STEEP
(Societal, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Political) was a new acronym I learnt at the Futuring 101 workshop on Friday, Sept 16th, the day before the Accelerating Change 2005 conference. A full day workshop, there were three lecturers, Dr Peter Bishop, Tom Conger of Social Technologies and George Gilder.
I was most impressed by Tom Conger’s presentation. He is a practicing futurist and founder of Social Technologies, a futures consulting firm based out of Washington DC. As he described his approach and methodology for future consulting, I could see why he had a client base like Nokia, Kraft and McDonalds. What I could not understand, however, is why aren’t those focusing on long term scenario building and forecasting for a 10 year span, as important, if not more than those consulting on short term, immediate return/profit innovation alone. While coming up with ideas for your next big paradigm shifting product is certainly valuable, the futurists take a longer term, holistic view and facilitate innovation in a more profound way.
Certainly, Conger shared with us the limitations of being a consultant and a change agent, the need for long term commitments to projects, and the sometimes off track requirements of Wall Street that business must meet. But more and more I could see how the work the futurists are doing can map on to the work the product planners, design planners and strategists do. Social Technologies is already hiring an ethnographer, in an effort to better understand the impact of the now on the future. I believe that both designers and design managers, new product managers and strategists, need to start taking a larger contextual worldview into consideration before recommending tactics for the short term.
NB: I found this blog post by Jon Udell which is an excellent and comprehensive overview of the conference.