Most potential non-academic users of SD have never heard of the techniques. Among those that have, significant reservations about their use are often encountered.

The SDS has not discharged its enabling role for the SD commercial/professional sphere in the past fifty years. Nothing, including the activities of the few firms that develop professional SD models, has replaced the resulting vacuum.

An unknown significant number of professional applications are in place. However, they are believed to be mostly corporate-confidential or national-security-classified, and thus are never talked about publicly.

SD promotion by the SDS should have compensated for the consequences of confidentiality, but has not.

A standalone professional practitioner is thus left with nothing to show and use from the SD era to date, for marketing purposes. The practitioner has the greatest difficulty in compensating for the lack of previous promotional effort and cohesive support by the SDS. I have often encountered a situation in which SD is regarded by potential clients as completely untried; almost as though I had invented the techniques in the past few months.

I therefore reasoned that the appropriate course of action was for the SDS to begin to make good the above shortfall, so that people in my position could advance the ‘reach’ of the techniques with useful applications. To this end I approached the SDS in late 2007.