One of the aspects of conversations that I love is how there are often threads of a specific conversation that will live with you cognitively for some time afterwards. I guess this happens a whole lot more than we may realise. Then, there will be seemingly disparate threads that connect up quite serendipitously.

An example:

Thread 1: A few weeks ago I was sitting with Pre Rangusamy . As the HR head of one of South Africa's biggest organisations ..., he's pretty witty and savvy. In pressing me on the philosophical and sociological influences behind what I was telling him about stories and narrative in organisations, he commented that he wanted to know that what I was speaking of was not another fad ala Senge , Balanced Scorecard, Process Re-engineering, etc.

Thread 2: Carl recently commented in response to my post on Collapsing models that he prefers to think of models (belief systems, ways of doing things, structured processes) that are either enriched or impoverished. I nice thought, I thought!

Synthesised Thread: Carl's comment got me thinking about how I view the fads that Pre mentioned and how he perhaps sees them. As soon as you classify a model as a fad you take away its validity as a model. It is then relegated to the realm of models that we thought might be useful, but were not.

Is this really what happens, that models have a shelf-life? Besides em loyalty ot people like Senge, I really wonder if what people like him construct have value only in a limited space in time? I wonder if we need to speak less about models that become fads, and more about models that become impoverished?

Because of episodic change, I suspect that what was once a fad might become relevant again as context and circumstances change in business. Can we afford to relegate models that are no longer useful in our current time and context?