The Toffler way of seeing, carried forward

Making sense of change
before it becomes history.

Information overload. Artificial intelligence. Shifting power. Relentless technological change. What feels new often has deeper roots. More than fifty years ago, Alvin and Heidi Toffler began asking how the accelerating pace of change was reshaping our lives, institutions, and society.

Their greatest contribution went beyond describing the changes they saw. They recognized patterns across seemingly unrelated fields, explored what those patterns meant, and gave people new ways to understand the forces reshaping their lives. The Pulse of Tomorrow tells the story of how they learned to see change differently, and why that way of thinking matters now.

Pre-order Book →

The Pulse of Tomorrow: How Future Shock Still Shapes Our World, by Deborah Westphal

Deborah Westphal with Alvin and Heidi Toffler — Deborah with Alvin and Heidi Toffler, 2010

Deborah Westphal & the Tofflers

Nearly twenty years of ideas, questions, and work.

Deborah Westphal worked alongside Alvin and Heidi Toffler for nearly twenty years, first as a consultant at Toffler Associates and later as its CEO. The relationship gave her the opportunity to know the people behind the ideas, understand how their thinking developed, and see what happened when those ideas were applied to problems far beyond the books in which they first appeared.

At Toffler Associates, Deborah worked with leaders across aerospace and defense, healthcare, telecommunications, technology, government, and national security. The work involved assessing change, challenging assumptions, developing strategies and plans, and helping organizations make consequential decisions about what came next.

It gave her a vantage point few biographers could have: years spent alongside Alvin and Heidi while also seeing their ideas tested against the complexity of the real world. Their unfinished memoir, taped conversations, personal papers, and Deborah's years of additional research allowed her to go further, tracing the experiences, relationships, and discoveries that shaped how they came to understand change.

That became the foundation for The Pulse of Tomorrow.

About Deborah →

The book

The Pulse of Tomorrow

How Future Shock Still Shapes Our World

The untold story of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift, and how their relentless curiosity led them beyond the familiar, teaching them to recognize change while it was still taking shape.

Alvin and Heidi moved across worlds that rarely intersected: factory floors and boardrooms, journalism and technology, science and government, the United States and countries undergoing profound change. They sought out people and ideas beyond what they already knew, questioned their own assumptions, listened to people living through change, and looked for connections across what they found. The Pulse of Tomorrow tells the story of how they learned to see change, the ideas that grew from it, and a way of learning that remains possible for all of us.

Available March 23, 2027

Explore the book →Preorder →

From the Pulse Report