Swinging Trend Pendulums (whiplash alert!)

Not signs of the apocalypse, exactly, but certainly a message that the zeitgeist is shifting comes this week from articles about two formerly red-hot trends that now seem headed for quick decline: work/life balance and design thinking. A Wall Street Journal piece by Lindsay Ellis on July 6 points out that the work-life balance trend, which emerged during the pandemic, is reversing amid today’s increasingly harsh employment landscape. So much for the focus on faculty well-being! The pendulum swings.

Fast Company, a bellwether business publication, ran a piece a year ago that design thinking was dead as a current business trend. In June 2025, Celine Nguyen, writing in The Atlantic, chronicled “the perils of design thinking.” Wow! It wasn’t but a few years ago that nearly every educational institution at any level wanted design thinking as part of its strategic planning process. Another pendulum swings.