Design and business: why can ' t we be friends?

Purpose – As design becomes more important for business, designers and business people need to work together more. However, they tend to find the relationship difficult, challenging and less productive than either side would wish. The purpose of this paper is to help both designers and business people work more productively with one another. Design/methodology/approach – The paper identifies the underlying schism between validity, which is favored by designers, and reliability, which is favored by business people, as the source of the relationship conflict. It then uses the key attributes of validity and reliability to form recommendations for each side to deal better with their counterparts. Findings – There are five practical and actionable things that designers can do to work better with business people and five equivalent things that business people can do to work better with designers. Originality/value – Currently, neither business people nor designers have a productive or coherent theory as to why their counterparts behave in ways that appear to them to be unproductive. To fill the theory gap, they tend to think badly of their counterparts. This paper provides both sides a productive theory of the other and a prescription for utilizing the theory to promote more productive collaboration.