A life spent asking what change means for people.

For more than three decades, Deborah Westphal has worked across technology, science, organizations, and society. Her career has taken her from engineering and national security to strategy, neuroscience, speaking and writing. Across those experiences, one thing has remained constant: curiosity about how change happens, what it means for people and institutions, and how seemingly separate developments connect to something larger.

Deborah is a strategist, author, and Chief Executive Officer of the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust. Personally recruited by Alvin Toffler, she spent nearly two decades working alongside Alvin and Heidi Toffler and more than twenty-five years helping develop, apply, and test their ideas in the real world. As CEO of Toffler Associates, she advised governments, military leaders, and Fortune 100 organizations confronting uncertainty, disruption, and change.

Her second book, The Pulse of Tomorrow: How Future Shock Still Shapes Our World (opens in a new tab), tells the story of Alvin and Heidi Toffler and how they learned to recognize change while it was still taking shape. Drawing on her years with the Tofflers, their unfinished memoir, recordings and papers, and extensive historical research, Deborah explores not only what they saw, but how they learned to see.

Today, she continues that exploration through her work at the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust, the Research Renaissance podcast, and The Pulse Report, examining the signals, systems, and ideas shaping what comes next.