Design Thinking: The New Enneagram?

Folks interested in "design thinking" would do well to go here to read a balanced response by Ric Edinberg to the claim by Natasha Jens that design thinking is, not put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
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Warning: Tongue-in-cheek. Mostly. 

What do everyone's favorite tool for self-understanding and the latest mantra for lawyers have in common? Not much unless faddishness counts for something.

While neither the Enneagram nor Design Thinking are trademarked, both are hot topics of discussion in certain circles. Workshops and websites about each abound. You can go to Wikipedia for useful descriptions of each but friend Chuck DeGroat's post here and the recent issue of The Wisconsin Lawyer got me to thinking about what the two have in common.

Chuck, who actually knows something about the Enneagram and uses it professionally, has recently seen himself transition from "enthusiastic to cautious" because the Enneagram has become such a popular tool it has become faddish. With that excitement, Chuck suspects, it will pass away when the next fad comes along. Which is a good thing as far as he's concerned. The Enneagram finds its home in the domain of spiritual formation, not the Twitterverse.

The same short shelf-life will probably true of design thinking although "design thinkers," at least its demotic ones, probably don't know it yet. Consider the following from "Legal Design Thinking" from the September 2019 issue of The Wisconsin Lawyer:

"What is design thinking? you might ask. Simply put, legal design thinking is an innovative problem-solving methodology being taught at leading U.S. law schools.

Where to start? How about answering a what question with a where. Or using "methodology" in place of "method." 

But let's persevere:

Essentially, it is a human-centered approach that identifies a client's needs, then designs a custom solution to achieve the most favorable outcome.

Human-centered as opposed to ...? And a custom solution ... who's paying for that?

Am I only a curmudgeon? Let's see:

Legal design thinking is relationship oriented, meaning that the lawyer approaches the problem from the participants' viewpoint instead of making assumptions about what the problem might be.

Perhaps I was ahead of my time but I regularly (always?) approached problems from my client's viewpoint. Usually the problem was damn clear: someone had not paid what my client believed was owed or my client wanted me to draft a contract to implement a deal. I guess I didn't know that I should have 

involved collaboration with professionals who had diverse skill sets [so we could] redesign a process, leverage existing technology differently, or design new technology.

And it only gets worse. 

I'm sure that someone, somewhere can make sense of "design thinking for lawyers" but they better do so quickly or we'll be on to the next fad before anyone figures out what the old one really meant.