Organized Dialogue for Social Innovation

I love to listen to the Stanford Discussions of the Social Innovation Conversations (usually when I'm on the treadmill in the fitness studio - it makes for an inspiring sweat!).

In "Evaluation: New Ways of Working Together", a distinguished panel discusses how "successful social innovation requires breaking down boundaries and working collaboratively across mulitple sectors for nonprofits, philanthropies and foundations, businesses, government, and more."

Such collaborative action is ideally modeled like an Organized Dialogue. OD is an interaction on many different levels, not just discursive argument. It can be everywhere where people interact openly with one another to work on a common task, and it's integrative across boundaries. I'll explain what I mean by OD in a short while - but I want to make the point here that social innovation processes are collaborative, participative processes which can and should be modeled like OD.