He has spent his career at the intersection of the outdoors and human performance — leading executives and innovators into wild terrain to restore the clarity that offices and boardrooms quietly destroy. Now he's put the evidence in a book. Bloomsbury agreed it was worth publishing.
Garry Pratt did not arrive at the outdoors by accident. He arrived there by accumulation — thirty-five years of building companies, consulting on strategy, advising startups, and eventually concluding that the best thinking he ever witnessed happened nowhere near a conference room. His route through the professional world is the kind that produces genuine perspective rather than polished talking points: advertising at Future Publishing (founded by Chris Anderson, later of TED fame), running a pan-European advertising sales team at MicroWarehouse, co-founding an early e-commerce venture before the infrastructure existed to support it, and then building Teachit — a SaaS platform for teachers that pioneered user-generated content, paying back profits to the educator community, and ultimately exited by selling to a charity in 2011. It still operates more than twenty years later and still employs people he knows.
Between and alongside those ventures he continued to found, advise, fail, and learn. A pre-TripAdvisor restaurant guide in print. A chain of cookshops that grew to 42 locations and eventually went under post-Brexit. A doctoral program at the University of Bath School of Management that stalled — but planted the seed for the book that followed. An Entrepreneur in Residence role at the University of Bath where, over three and a half years, he met and supported more than 100 early-stage digital founders. A Research Fellowship at the University of Bristol. He describes himself, accurately, as someone who has done a lot of different things and arrived at a clear conclusion: the best work happens when you go outside.
"Over the years, through trial and error, I have found my thinking 'space' and continue to find inspiration outside — with the absolute appreciation that my desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world." — Garry Pratt
In 2022, Bloomsbury Business published The Creativity Factor: Using the Power of the Outdoors to Spark Successful Innovation. It is not a wellness book and it is not a motivational one. It is a structured, evidence-based examination of why outdoor environments restore the conditions under which original thinking emerges — and a practical framework for entrepreneurs, executives, and creative professionals who want to use that understanding deliberately rather than accidentally. The research roots trace back to his doctoral work at Bath. The practical roots go back further than that.
The book sits at the intersection of cognitive science, entrepreneurial practice, and what Garry calls Cognitive Rewilding — the deliberate use of natural landscapes to counter the attentional fragmentation and decision fatigue that modern work produces at scale. The thesis is not that nature is pleasant. It is that nature is functional: that attention widens, thought reorganizes, and decisions regain proportion when a person is genuinely immersed in a natural environment rather than adjacent to one. That is a distinction Tymmber has been making since its founding.
Through his consultancy Outside Thinking, Garry works privately with a small number of founders, investors, executive teams, and leaders — typically during periods of transition, uncertainty, or the kind of constructive dissatisfaction that success doesn't automatically resolve. He designs immersive journeys in natural landscapes. He takes people hiking. He leads retreats and adventures that are expressly not therapy, not conventional coaching, and not retreat from responsibility. They are environments engineered for the kind of clarity that offices systematically prevent.
He is also a Trustee of Mind Over Mountains, a UK charity that delivers professional mental wellbeing support through walking in nature, mindfulness, and time with experienced coaches and counsellors — in settings that are deliberately unhurried and unpressured. The appointment is consistent with everything else in his work: a recognition that the outdoors is not merely a productivity tool but a human one, with real consequences for real people at the full range of need.
[Placeholder: Garry's statement on what drew him to Tymmber's mission — what he sees in the Hitch to Home ecosystem and the Sovereign Circle's potential, and what he intends to bring to the advisory table from the Outside Thinking and Cognitive Rewilding perspective.]
Tymmber is building the argument — in hardware, in content, in community — that the outdoors is a delivery mechanism for human development. Garry has been building the same argument from a different direction: through field practice with executives and founders, through academic research at two universities, and through a published book with one of the world's most respected business publishers. The convergence is not coincidental. It is the reason seat seven exists.
What he brings to this table is not just credibility in the outdoor space — it is credibility in the translation problem. The hard work is not convincing people that the outdoors matters. The hard work is building the frameworks, the language, the products, and the experiences that move people from knowing it to actually going. Garry has spent his career on exactly that problem, and he has the track record — and the book — to show what it looks like when you get it right.