But one definition of a “real futurist” might be: “Somebody who’s stuff looks better the older it gets.” In such an enlightened dictionary, Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s pictures would appear prominently. If you’re the sort of person who thinks anyone claiming to have a crystal ball is a huckster, you may be allergic to some who describe themselves as “futurists.” But one definition of a “real futurist” might be: “Somebody who’s stuff looks better the older it gets.” In such an enlightened dictionary, Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s pictures would appear prominently.
Even before Carver Mead spawned the phrase “Moore’s Law,” the Tofflers were broadcasting the news of accelerating change as predetermined and an “elemental force.”¹ They made a respectable endeavor out of thinking systematically and rationally about rapid transformations, unanticipated consequences, and nonlinear weirdness. That is to say, reality as it has actually been experienced over the last half-century. If reviewers shorthanded them with the “futurist” label, at least the Tofflers came by it honorably. Future Shock does indeed look remarkably good, even 50 years out.
It’s all in there: predicted feelings of loss of control and reactive revulsion against purported intelligence and even science, how little we actually knew about adaptability, the significance of nostalgia. Then there is their immortal: “The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”² It’s hard to remember that it was once rare, while making personal decisions in the present, to think about the future.
Equally remarkable was their methodology. Alvin was a proudly lackluster student who became an associate editor of Fortune³. He demonstrated that quality journalism’s professional techniques—especially silo-busting, pattern-seeking, connect-the-dots-wherever-you-find-them, and relentless gum-shoe interviewing of real people—could blow away the achievements of, oh, some PhD anthropologists. Other forward-thinking world-shapers of the Tofflers’ era who similarly flouted the credentials-obsessed norms of the time include the urbanist Lewis Mumford and social critic and urbanist Jane Jacobs. Mumford never earned a degree of any kind and worked for The New Yorker⁴. Yet, academics now embrace his work as that of an historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology. Jane Jacobs—who also never earned a degree—got her start on the women’s page of the Scranton Times-Tribune. After moving to New York, she freelanced to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.⁵
To be sure, Future Shock’s 1970 index reveals the Tofflers’ lack of omniscience. It has nothing, for example, about the then-named⁶ Advanced Research Projects Agency, which in 1970 was already adding nodes to the ARPANET at the rate of one a month.⁷ So much for “futurism” anticipating the internet.
But the gear wasn’t really the Tofflers’ game. They focused on the humans. They drilled deep on values, and how humans could and should adapt. Even before the first Earth Day they presciently wrote, “The individual needs to be seen as part of a total system.” They recognized that approach as “human ecology.”⁸
Focusing on the humans was a smart move. It’s why Future Shock is worth returning to half a century later.
I try to stay riveted on that lesson—it’s about the humans—in my current audacious scheme at Arizona State University, The Guide Project: How to Design the Future.⁹
The notion driving The Guide Project is that humans have been shaping the future since fire. What’s new is the number of organizations treating the human future as a design space—with good outcomes. That’s an inflection point in history. For millennia people have viewed the future as something that happens to them. They’re just along for the ride. Now we have existence proof. We can steer!
The Guide Project aims to connect functional, hard-headed communities of practice with a track record of designing the future. We uncover the “pattern language” ¹⁰ of these seasoned practitioners, revealing the hundreds of battle-tested, shippable, scalable methods by which they’ve succeeded. Call it the revenge of Steve Jobs, if you like.
Next steps for this Guide Network: Get closer and closer to experience-based reality by adding, subtracting, dividing, honing, polishing, and being inspired by their pioneering efforts. Symphonize the rapidly growing wisdom, experience, and best practices of these communities achieving success practically.
We aim to accelerate novel, ambitious ways to imagine—and then create—human futures in which we can thrive. The Guidebook, however, is just the start. As our colleague Brad Allenby says, “The missing element is teaching ‘Designing Complex Adaptive Systems While Being Part of Them.’ You need someone who is humble enough to know how daunting this is, and yet strong enough to operate outside the boundaries of the usual domains.”
The aim is for highly imaginative people to rapidly scale up to a functional, global movement treating the future as a design space.
Plus, a few dreams on very large scales: Like accelerating “novel, audacious ways to imagine—and then create—a human future in which we can thrive.”
The Guide Project is a systematic, rational way of approaching the future in pragmatic, testable ways. It focuses on humans who every day plow these fields and get their hands dirty, like the Tofflers. The goal is to research and collect the broad pattern language common to everyone like them.
If that’s what you want to call futurism, then fine.
Of course, if getting one’s hands dirty is the test, well, my second favorite possible definition of a “real futurist” is: “Somebody who plants oak trees.”
Joel Garreau is Professor of Culture, Values and Emerging Technology at Arizona State University. He served long-time as a member of the pioneering scenario-planning enterprise Global Business Network. He helped create the “world” for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. For his future-forward culture-and-values work as a reporter for The Washington Post, he was nominated for the Pulitzer seven times. He is the author of several books, most recently Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – And What It Means to Be Human (Doubleday). Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he does not have a degree in anything.
1. Pages 3–4 of the 1970 edition.
2 Page 4.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford?fbclid=IwAR2PimuTVYfbJAziCGffNPz2
Neel6Yz6ZXXPUYK7vMJritK1lB4WGnfLNtE
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
6 https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/arpa-name-change
7 https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
8 Page 291.