The Little Black Dress

Regular readers will know that I don’t shy away from getting personal when it comes to social media posts, but let me set expectations clearly now: I do not own a little black dress, and as far as I recall, I’ve never worn one either.

The Little Black Dress, or ‘LBD’ as it is also known, has come to epitomise the ubiquitous fashion solution. It’s a wardrobe staple that works in a whole range of contexts. It has given rise to the common cliché “X is the new black” – in other words, the new classic.

But fashion is a fickle thing.

I’ve already reached that age where I see the stuff I wore as a teenager hanging off the kids of today. My crucial ‘teenage fashion’ era is the late eighties in to the early nineties, so seeing neon, Doc Martens, braces and high-top trainers in the streets and the shop windows takes me back to the era of GCSEs and A Levels. It’s off-putting to say the least.

But it can’t help but make me muse on the circular nature of the world we operate in.

We see fashion trends coming round full circle in our business world too. In some ways, SOA is the new OO. There's the waterfall, the V, the X, the W.. The iterative versus linear lifecycle swing that takes a few years to swing around.

The V model as I understand it is ultimately derived from Victorian engineering processes. Public failures of engineering such as bridges collapsing or buildings falling down would be headline news – so naturally processes were swiftly introduced to avoid such things ever happening again. Evolutions of these processes have worked in a variety of contexts ever since - but the method is no longer the only show in town and others have sprung up around.

With progress in mind, I’m often surprised just how many ‘thought leaders’ adopt a fundamentalist and almost religious approach to their work; take up a position and then defend it to the hilt. There are the leading lights in these ‘religious orders’ who will staunchly defend their methodology across all the social platforms - and their acolytes will also do their bit in proliferating the gospel according to X.

But I say let’s be open-minded.

To my mind, almost everything that’s out there has a place; it’s the appropriateness and context of application (in the non-reserved sense!) that changes. I’ve seen organisations adopt radically different change delivery models (with the consequent pain and loss of productivity) in order to try and fix engagement problems that often boiled down to people and communication issues. Not methodology.

Evolution, or ‘the new LBD’, is just the way of the world – so adopting a ‘fight to be right’ mentality about innovation is pretty futile. Debate is healthy, but when it degrades into personal criticisms and trolling out there on social media, it's gone too far. For the most part, humans like change (it’s as good as a rest) and variety - so there’s an inevitability that things will move on, and, in time, evolve and return.

As Coco Chanel, ‘inventor’ of the LBD once said, “Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.”

In business however, we know we need to be able to embrace failure sometimes in order to progress - so with that in mind, I’ll be in full neon this season.