Recollections

Theodore J. Gordon

Al Toffler wrote about how the world around us was changing more rapidly every day, and how the acceleration in the rate of the changes was leaving us in a new land with which we were not yet familiar, different from history, different from our childhoods. We now know that the acceleration about which he wrote was not a bump in the road, but an enduring aspect of our world. Who would have guessed back then that we could carry little machines in our pockets that give us instant access to our friends, to entertainment on-demand, to facts of history, to news of the day, to trivia beyond reason, to products that the machines—through algorithms, past purchases, and big data, somehow “know” we want. The accelerations that Al Toffler spotted continue unabated.

I met Alvin Toffler when I was in my late 30s and he was in his early 40s. I think it was in about 1968, and Al was hot on the trail of what became his monumental best-selling book, Future Shock. He had already written an article about possible future technological and social changes and their impacts on society in a Horizon magazine article titled “The Future as a Way of Life,” and I had written and published my book, immodestly called The Future (a title later also used by Al Gore; that’s okay, Mr. Gore). I had left McDonald Douglas Aircraft where I had been in charge of development of Space Stations and Planetary systems, left my consulting assignment at RAND where I worked with Olaf Helmer on applications of the Delphi method, and in 1968, with Olaf and several others¹, co-founded the Institute for the Future in Middletown, Connecticut, at the invitation of Wesleyan University. It is important for me to mention this background because Al Toffler became a consultant for the Institute and interviewed me and others there for the book that turned out to be the enormously influential Future Shock.

Toffler impacted the world; in 1966, he taught one of the first futures courses at the New School for Social Research in New York. A year later, Jim Dator was teaching futures at Virginia Polytech Institute, and Wendell Bell was teaching futures at Yale.² The consequences of Future Shock were much greater than single academic courses, however. With six million copies printed, we can assume three times as many readers, and that perhaps 10 times as many people had heard about its themes. TV specials based on the book had even broader audiences. Future Shock made futures more respectable as a field of inquiry. Political leaders such as Newt Gingrich and social opinion leaders such as Betty Friedan were Al’s friends, accepted the premises of the book, and apparently based decisions on its assumptions. Al and his wife, Heidi, collaborated on the research behind this and other books, and travelled together whenever they could. Al urged Heidi to accept credit as a co-author, rather than only acknowledgment as a contributor.

Al and Heidi used their journalistic skills to collect information for the books, and Al’s persuasive and lively writing style made the books and articles come alive.

I met Al when he came to the Institute for the Future to interview me. He was an imaginative synthesizer, drawing facts and opinions from many sources, adding his own points of view, and explaining what it all meant socially, politically, and generally. As I recall, we talked about how to send astronauts to Mars and beyond, how life support systems might allow a form of hibernation on long voyages, trajectories that could get us there, the futures techniques that we were developing at the Institute, the prospect for DNA modification, and what we might do with this new godlike capacity.

Al became a consultant to the Institute, where he was listed as specializing in “psychological and sociological implications for the future.” One of the first assignments of the new institute was to construct a simulation game for the State of Connecticut, depicting what life might be like 40 or 50 years hence. The game was a simulation, with role-playing participants interacting within a sketchy, predetermined partial script. Al played the part of an aging hippie, and he attacked this role with vigor and imagination. As the game years ticked by, Al used 1960s slang (e.g., “outta sight” and “groovy” for excellent, “bread” for money, etc.); we realized that was a mistake. Surely fringe members of a future society will invent new words, new modes of behavior, and perhaps even new languages as well. The light dawned: language, along with goals and values, is at least a partially cultural invention as well as a response to technological and social pressures.

“

He was an imaginative synthesizer, drawing facts and opinions from many sources, adding his own points of view, and explaining what it all meant socially, politically, and generally.

”

One of many conjectures about the future in Future Shock was the prospect for vacation spots that offered simulations of history that invited vacationers to enter a simulated time, wearing appropriate period costumes and speaking the language, separated from the present by technology, time, and geography. This was the Connecticut game played in reverse. Great idea! If I could, what time period would I dial in? Where in history would I like to go? The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, ancient Egypt to meet Cleopatra, or the Late Cretaceous (but for no longer than an instant, please). Other ideas that seem poised to become mainstream reality (or have become so already) include game payoffs in experiences (e.g., erotic brain stimulation), education as a pastime, temporary “slavery” as a penalty for losing a simulation game, and diminishing attention span of readers.

Of other futurists of the time, Herman Kahn represented the “genius” mode of forecasting; he crafted insightful scenarios about what might lie ahead, alone or with contributions from a few colleagues. Al, on the other hand, collected his information from interviews, and as a journalist, cross-checking his sources and asking tough and intelligent questions that demanded intelligent answers. He drew conclusions from the diversity of data, the collision of trends, and the discontinuities of inventions. His strength was not making correct forecasts, although he made many of those, but in describing the meaning and consequences of those trends and inventions. For example, in Future Shock he wrote about the rapidity of shifting consumer needs, anticipatory democracy, experiential vacations, emerging fashions, the new field of futures research, and changing social structures. When he wrote about hippies of the future, a role he played in the Connecticut game, he said, “The working-class hippie and the hippie who dropped out of Exeter or Eaton share a common style of life but no common class. […] Thus, the stranger launched into American or English or Japanese or Swedish society today must choose not among four or five classes-based styles of life, but among literally hundreds of diverse possibilities. Tomorrow. […] this number will be even larger.” He didn’t mention fragmentation through social media, but he caught the essence of it.

“

We are shocked by surprises, unwanted consequences of our behavior, unanticipated results, formerly the unrecognized effects. We are victims of an un-tamed future that forces us to run harder and faster as we sense we are getting further and further behind, battered by crisis after crisis.

”

Wendell Bell, speaking about the theme and consequences of Future Shock, perhaps said it best: “Change, Toffler said, is increasingly rapid. Changes are rolling over us, outstripping our images of the future and our abilities to adapt, much less to plan for them and to control them to our individual and collective benefit. We are shocked by surprises, unwanted consequences of our behavior, unanticipated results, formerly the unrecognized effects. We are victims of an untamed future that forces us to run harder and faster as we sense we are getting further and further behind, battered by crisis after crisis.” ³

Al was an advocate of anticipatory democracy. Olaf Helmer saw the possibility of political candidates competing on the basis of futures they would strive to achieve; people would vote for the person who held a future image closest to their own. Al, on the other hand, saw futures research as a means for developing alternative political positions based on opinions collected from large swaths of the population, locally to globally. He described how technology might be used to collect opinions about what the future ought to be from literally millions of people who would, after all, occupy the future.

I wonder what he would have said if some off-stage voice had whispered to him: “Al, this is the President speaking. I’m telling you that the media are the enemy of the people. And you want to play games?”

Theodore Jay Gordon is one of the world’s most respected futurists and management consultants. He is an entrepreneur, an inventor, and a specialist in forecasting methodology, planning, and policy analysis. He is co-founder and Board member of The Millennium Project. He is the recipient of the Ed Cornish “Futurist of the Year” award and is a recipient of the Shaping Tomorrow Lifetime Achievement Award. He performed early research on the Delphi method at RAND Corporation, where he was a consultant to their mathematics and policy department and he co-authored the first large-scale Delphi study (Gordon and Helmer, 1964). Throughout his career he has been at the forefront of development of forecasting and analysis methodology, including the development of the Cross Impact Method, Trend Impact Analysis, implications of nonlinear modeling (chaos) for forecasting, and the State of the Future Index (SOFI), a means for measuring and forecasting the changing outlook of the future, and in the development and application of Real-Time Delphi to essentially all foresight and policy studies performed at the Millennium Project. See full bio here: http://www.millennium-project.org/about-us/planning-committee/ted-gordon/.

1. Members of the Organizing Committee were myself, Olaf Helmer, Paul Baran, and Arnold Kramish.

2. (Bell, Wendell, 1977, “Foundations of Futures Studies, V1. p 161.)

3. Bell, op. cit.