Shaping desirable futures: Designing actionable perspectives and solutions for system-level transformation in multi-stakeholder environments

Grand societal challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss, are complex, ill-structured, and continually evolving issues that must be addressed to ensure a sustainable future. Addressing such challenges requires system-level transformation that goes beyond smaller-scale interventions, due to the many interdependencies involved. Such transformation typically unfolds in multi-stakeholder environments, where diverse actors, including firms, research and educational institutions, NGOs, governments, and financial institutions, collaborate. While the need for system-level transformation is widely acknowledged, the specifics of what it entails and how it can be achieved remain unclear. This dissertation explores how actionable perspectives and solutions can be designed to support system-level transformation in multi-stakeholder environments. Traditional approaches that aim to define and solve well-defined problems often fall short in the face of the complexity and uncertainty of grand societal challenges. Instead, intentional efforts are needed to shape these open-ended situations into viable alternatives. Creating actionable perspectives and solutions enables actors to view situations differently and identify feasible paths toward desirable futures. To realize this potential, design offers a promising approach, as it systematically creates solution artifacts that help transform existing situations into desirable alternatives. The central challenge of this dissertation is: How to design actionable perspectives and solutions to support system-level transformation in multi-stakeholder environments in response to grand challenges? To address this question, the dissertation follows a design science approach, assuming that complex, ill-structured, and dynamic challenges can only be understood in the process of exploring potential solutions. Across five studies, we develop various possible solutions to better understand the problem of designing actionable perspectives and solutions that support system-level transformation in diverse multi-stakeholder environments in response to grand societal challenges. Grand societal challenges arise from deeply entrenched patterns, making it difficult to shift social systems. Yet these systems should not be accepted as unchangeable. The first study lays the foundation by examining how agents embedded in seemingly stuck systems can mindfully deviate from existing paths to actively shape the conditions for new ones. Drawing on a mechanism-based review, it synthesizes the dispersed literature on path creation to identify a framework of mechanisms for agentic interventions in mindful deviation across dimensions of context, time, and interaction. Responding to grand challenges also involves navigating fundamental uncertainty, which complicates strategic decision-making. The second study explores how strategists can leverage this uncertainty by reimagining possibilities for value generation. Using narrative imagination, it theorizes mechanisms driving strategic imagination and proposes a structured process to help strategists construct new representations of reality, transforming value generation possibilities in the present. While strategic imagination offers a way to navigate uncertainty, mature industries present a different challenge: deeply embedded routines that constrain system-level transformation. Routinized activity in mature industries often causes actors to focus on the localized actions, rather than considering the structure of interdependencies at the system level. Using a routine lens, the third study analyzes recurrent activities in the Dutch poultry industry, exemplifying a mature industry, and reveals distinct generative models that drive these activities. These models are interpreted as ecosystems, which in mature industries resemble taken-for-granted routines. The resulting ecosystem-as-routines lens supports the identification of leverage points for intentionally reconfiguring routinized activities across the system. In mature industries facing pressures for transformation, envisioning fundamentally different futures can be challenging due to the dominance of existing systems. The fourth study aims to expand the opportunity space for system-level transformation by utilizing future images as design tools. These images help actors to envision alternative socio-technical contexts that present alternative opportunities for transformation. These future images can inspire innovation and generate new directions for development grounded in distinct sustainability conceptualizations and actor configurations. Finally, addressing grand societal challenges in many industries requires transforming existing value generation structures, not just at the firm level, but at the system level, across entire ecosystems. The fifth study creates a five-step ecosystem model innovation process to support sustainability transformation. It iteratively develops and evaluates this process by articulating a design logic drawing on the ecosystem literature and the concept of projectivity. The resulting actionable, future-oriented ecosystem model innovation process supports actors in intentionally distancing from current models, envisioning alternatives, and experimenting with ways to connect these alternatives to actionable transformation pathways. Overall, this dissertation makes two contributions. First, it lays the foundations for and demonstrates the relevance of designing actionable perspectives and solutions as a key approach to support system-level transformation, a distinct area of inquiry. It shows that this requires i) understanding the actors in the specific multi-stakeholder environment that is the target of the design effort, ii) articulating a design intention that specifies a particular desired future, and iii) enabling new viewpoints that lead to concrete roadmaps for transformation embodied in visual or material artifacts. Second, this dissertation deepens the understanding of how to systematically design actionable perspectives and solutions. It shows that framing plays a central role in design science by guiding the synthesis that enables researchers to embrace ambiguity, allowing them to create solution artifacts and generate instrumental knowledge.