"Journey Making": co-creating and opening strategy while addressing grand challenges

As societies recover from the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic and its ramifications, it becomes evident that academic research cannot wait but must engage with today's complex and large-scale challenges. As a result, interdisciplinary, participatory architectures must be deployed, including opportunities for the co-creation and testing new tools, ideas, and solutions to address grand challenges. However, past research shows that working across silos and organizational boundaries is not easy, and the grand challenges agenda can become diluted over time as part of the unfolding strategy implementation. In this paper, we present the "Journey Making" qualitative methodology by Ackermann and Eden, which has been applied fruitfully in other related fields, namely strategy and project management. We adopt “Journey Making” to grand challenges research, reflecting on the theoretical implications for understanding grand challenges and co-creating impact by attending to process, context, and content of the multi-stakeholder conversation. Building on a qualitative empirical study with Mental Health Networks in Australia, we show how “Journey Making” can contribute to grand challenges research by mapping grand challenges as complex systems of interdisciplinary mutual relations and allowing for an inclusive and transparent strategy between different organizations and occupational communities in the pursuit of a shared purpose. The underlying 'Journey' captures the ongoing pathway for impact as researchers and participants support one another in understanding what grand challenges are in practice and how they can be addressed effectively.