AI x Circular Fashion, Solar - Powered Fabrics, Decentralized Leadership Models

1. AI × Circular Fashion

Circular fashion already exists, you may protest. After all, there are so many charity shops that resell clothes that are currently fashionable or meet a particular vibe. 

However, we should not be complacent as worldwide 92 million tonnes of textile waste, which includes clothing, is burnt or sent to landfill. The fashion industry should be applauded for taking circular fashion seriously. 

Circular fashion aims to create a system where the fashion is worn, it can be resold, then easily repaired, and finally recycled into raw materials to make new items, reducing the fashion industry’s massive effect on the environment.

Regulatory bodies have also recognised the importance of sustainability. For example, the EU has a Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which has been in place for some years and is maintaining pressure on designers, manufacturers and wearers to improve sustainability.

AI is making a major impact in reducing textile waste as it can be used to make the best use of design for cutting patterns from raw materials, leaving less waste.

Patagonia has implemented a “Worn Wear” programme that enables customers to trade in worn gear for credit. The worn items are then refurbished and resold, again reducing waste.

Another big issue faced by fashion has been overproduction. Among others, Zara’s parent company Inditex uses AI to fight this by assessing real-time sales and social media to project likely demand so that they design, produce and stock items that more closely fit with what consumers want now.

2. Solar-Powered Fabrics

Solar-powered fabrics have been researched for over a decade. These are fabrics with photovoltaic cells embedded in them, giving the user portable on-the-go energy, usually with the aim of powering devices. A more advanced method is embedding photovoltaic material into each fibre, which allows the fibres to be woven, knitted and incorporated directly into clothing.

The downside of solar-powered fabrics is that their inherent movement, flexibility and exposure to bad weather over time are likely to affect the photovoltaic material adversely.

Initially seen as a novelty, solar fabrics have now been designed into wearable items by designers such as Tommy Hilfiger, who designed his Solar Jacket, which stores the sun’s energy in a power bank, allowing mobile devices to be charged. Vollebak designed a solar-charged jacket that absorbs energy during the day and then glows at night.

As you can imagine, using solar-powered fabrics would be a massive environmental advantage. Think of all the devices that just need to be charged from something you’re wearing – no need for mains electricity! 

What about disasters and emergencies where no utilities are available? Glowing jackets, like Vollebak’s, would keep rescue workers visible and safe at night. In addition, their communication and navigation devices could be powered from batteries charged by solar-powered fabric.

However, solar-powered fabric is so much more than clothing. It can be used for tents, backpacks, and even beach parasols. These fabrics give the user energy wherever they are, so that running out of charge becomes a thing of the past.

Stanford University and MIT are currently looking at the use of graphene and nanomaterials to make even more advanced solar-powered fabrics, thinner than paper and with better efficiency.

Once researchers have discovered how to make solar-powered fabrics as durable as normal textiles and as washable as them, their use will explode. This brave new world of always available solar energy will ensure that our electricity suppliers won’t need to supply power to the millions of devices all over the world. That is a serious saving for the environment and sustainability.

3. Decentralised Leadership 

Decentralised leadership is where an organisation gives employees at all its levels the ability to make decisions. The idea being that power and authority are distributed more evenly throughout the organisation. There are a number of different models of decentralised leadership. These include:

• Functional Decentralisation, which delegates authority for decisions to a function or an area of expertise. For example, the marketing department or the IT department.
• Administrative Decentralisation, which gives decision-making authority for administrative issues to appropriate management and/or departments.
• Market Decentralisation, where decisions are taken by business units specially created to deal with a geographic area or specific customer demographic.

Peter Drucker was a famous management guru credited with creating modern management. He was a keen advocate of giving those at lower levels than the boardroom the ability and authority to take decisions.

Often, a decentralisation of leadership also means a flatter organisational structure, which can lead the organisation to faster decision-making, compounding its agility.   

Decentralisation means there is a much reduced bottleneck when making decisions, decisions are made more quickly, and where groups of people make decisions, there is less leader burnout.

American company, Zappos, adopted a type of decentralised leadership called holocracy, which uses self-organising teams with the aim of creating an agile and innovative business. Unfortunately, for Zappos, there was a complete lack of clarity as to who was making strategic decisions, how people were being paid and even what they were meant to be doing. Consequently, Zappos moved away from a full holocracy but still practices decentralised leadership with more of a marketing decentralisation, where small teams perform as microenterprises within Zappos. Each microenterprise decides what to sell and sells its products and services internally or to external customers. The key is that they must be profitable!

The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain operates more of an administrative decentralisation, where they empower all employees and give them a budget of around $2,000 per incident for them to resolve customer issues in any way they think is appropriate.

The decentralisation model works particularly well with hybrid and remote working.

The advantage decentralisation has over “traditional” leadership is that it enables fast decision-making, innovation and improves employee satisfaction.

However, one of the downsides of decentralisation is that it needs an organisation that trusts all levels of its employees, which can be a challenge for the more traditional businesses. Also, if you have any employees who don’t buy into the decentralisation of accountability, decentralisation will not be as effective.

Cross-Trend Synergies

Decentralised leadership means that people can accelerate the adoption of AI and the circular economy, so that it happens much more quickly. Smaller teams can move much more quickly, so that relatively new technology, such as solar fabrics, can be innovated rapidly, reducing its current challenges and enabling it to work towards more effective sustainability.

Conclusion & Outlook

Circular fashion, solar fabrics and decentralised leadership are all working towards a world where sustainability improves massively and where employees are empowered to make the changes that support sustainability.

The next one to five years are key as a new generation takes over businesses and sets the sustainability agenda. Looking forward, we should see circular fashion go mainstream in this time, along with solar fabrics, as customers are educated in the ways these affect the environment.

Decentralised leadership is already here. However, it will take time for it to be trusted in the larger, more traditional organisations and some institutions, such as the NHS, are unlikely to revert from large multi-hospital trusts to single hospitals.