“Journey Making”: co-creating impact by unpacking grand challenges as complex systems of interdisciplinary interdependencies

As societies continue to recover from the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic and its ramifications, it becomes evident that academic research cannot wait but engage with today's complex and large-scale challenges. Such grand challenges (GCs) include, among others, climate change, sustainability, mental health, poverty alleviation, and gender inequality. As a result, interdisciplinary, participatory architectures need to be deployed, including opportunities for co-creation and testing new tools, ideas, and solutions to address GCs. However, past research shows that working across silos and organizational boundaries is not easy, and the GC agenda can become diluted with time as part of unfolding strategy implementation. Hence, despite these important existing contributions, the endeavour to understand GCs is still in its early stages. In this paper, we present the “Journey Making” (JM) methodology by Ackermann and Eden and adapt it for working on GCs research, as well as discuss its theoretical implications for understanding GCs. Building on a qualitative empirical study with mental health networks in Australia, we show how JM can substantiate GCs research by mapping GCs as complex systems of interdisciplinary mutual relations. The underlying ‘journey’ captures the ongoing pathway for impact as researchers and participants support one another in understanding what GCs are in practice and how they can be addressed effectively.