Strategic design research: Co-designing organizational transformation from within

In this article, we discuss and argue for the value of working with strategic design in organizational settings through inventive research practices rooted in co-design and design anthropology. More specifically, we propose a process of collaborative experimentation staged as a series of events that establish relations between everyday organizational perspectives and practices and organizational strategic documents. We base our analytical discussions and reflections on a research project carried out in the organizational setting of a labour union. We describe how a programme‐experiment informed design research approach, driven by and reliant on collaborative explorations, provides a scaffold for unlocking organizational strategic management visions and goals in interaction with transformational perspectives on organizational practices. We frame our approach as a research strategy of working ‘from within’ the organizational setting, which focuses on staging dialogues between the experimental and the managerial. Such a disposition, we argue, offers important alternatives to management literatures’ current approaches to strategic design research.