Boundaryless OD: The Promise & Potential of Extending OD to Address Humanity’s Wicked Problems

As a discipline, organizational development has been around for over 70 years and in that time, it has helped countless organizations become not only more humane places to work but also has helped organizations better align themselves and increase their effectiveness and efficiency to achieve hoped-for goals. As important as it is that OD helps organizations improve in these noble ways, an even nobler potential exists for OD to extend its domain and elevate its stature to help facilitate solving humanity’s wicked problems.

The fact is, a tremendous opportunity exists for each of us as OD/Change leaders to extend the promise and potential of organization development practices, tools, and techniques to not only solve organizational problems, but also help solve humanity’s most intractable challenges. Hence, in this post we discuss the notion of ‘Boundaryless OD’ which describes extending and elevating the practice of OD to address larger, social issues at the scale of community, ecosystem, nation, and planet.

In this episode, you’ll learn:  What is Boundaryless OD and how it differs from Traditional OD  The tremendous opportunity that exists for each of us as OD/change leaders  Reasons why & how to get started with practicing Boundaryless OD beginning today

CHAPTERS 0:00 – Introduction 2:00 – Traditional OD vs. Boundaryless OD 3:46 – A Tremendous opportunity exists for each of us 5:45 – Opportunities where we can apply our OD expertise to societal issues 7:42 – Why you should consider broadening your OD horizons 9:20 – How does one begin to practice Boundaryless OD

Hope you enjoy!

-Randall Scott