Biography

Dianne Argyris began her consulting practice in 1998. Prior to this she was the Head of Training and Development at Lotus Development, now a part of IBM.

Dianne began her career in the early 1980's, when she had the unique experience of apprenticing to her father, Chris Argyris, a pioneer in the field of Organizational Behavior and Industrial Psychology. Through this work, as well as her graduate work at Harvard, she built a strong intellectual and theoretical foundation for her work as an organizational consultant.

Upon completing her doctorate in the late eighties, she joined an innovative strategy consulting start-up called GeoPartners Research Inc. She was recruited to the firm based on the founder's belief that in order to implement strategy effectively, one needed a strong understanding of group dynamics.

Between her apprenticeship with her father and her work at GeoPartners, she was able to gain, early in her career, a view into the kinds of thorny issues experienced by executives at the highest levels of organizations like AT&T, Boston Consulting Group, Bell Labs, UNIX System Laboratories, Citibank, and Greenwich Research Associates.

While this was invaluable training, she was advising people on how to behave within the corporation without having ever had to work inside a corporation herself. So in 1991 Dianne joined Unix System Laboratories, a spin-off of AT&T, as their first internal organizational development manager reporting to the COO. In her second year at Unix she was asked to become Director of Human Resources. While there, she instituted an early version of the now standard business partner role for HR generalists. She was also the HR lead on Unix's merger with Novell.

In 1994 Dianne joined Lotus Development Corporation as a member of their innovative Human Resources organization. As a Senior Organizational Development Consultant, she led the effort to establish the first formal Employee Relations function at Lotus, and provided change management consulting to line clients and Human Resources colleagues. Her last position at Lotus was as Head of Training and Development, which included management, leadership, and technical training.

In 1998 she began her own practice providing consulting services to organizations in a wide variety of industries, including the non-profit arena. In addition, she served on the faculty for AT&T's High Potential Executive Education Program, the Columbia General Management Executive Education Program, the Action Design Associates' Institute and the "Conversations with Masters" Series on Coaching and Intervention Skills sponsored by Mobius Executive Leadership and Integral Leadership and Coaching.

Education & Professional Affiliations

Dianne holds an MA and Ed.D in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received a BA in psychology at Connecticut College.

She is a frequent peer reviewer for the Harvard Business School Press, and an associate of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premiere Organizational Development firm.

She has served as co-chair of the Board of Smith Leadership Academy Charter School, and was a trustee of Boston's North Suffolk Mental Health Association.

She has served on the Advisory Board of BrassRing, LLC (now Kenexa), and is a member of the Student-Alumni Mentoring Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Theoretical Foundation

Dianne holds a masters and doctoral degree from the Harvard School of Education. There she developed expertise in adult development and learning as well as in qualitative methodologies for understanding and evaluating organizations. She studied with groundbreaking scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Larry Kohlberg. During that time she was part of a core group of researchers that developed the first qualitative methodology for incorporating Carol Gilligan's seminal work on the nature of adult development in women. Dianne's doctoral research was on understanding how professionals act effectively when facing moral dilemmas at work.

Prior to graduate school, she worked closely with her father, Chris Argyris, to create the first qualitative methodology for an action science approach to evaluating individual and organizational effectiveness. That approach has since been widely adopted in the field. Its concepts of Espoused Theory and Theory-in-Use, Ladder of Inference, Advocacy and Inquiry and Double-Loop Learning have become the foundation for some of the most influential and widespread management advice including Senge's work on The Fifth Discipline and Patton, Stone and Heen's Difficult Conversations.

She has published in the area of qualitative methodology, including an article on applied ethnography that was cited in the Sage 2000 Handbook of Qualitative Research as having provided "perhaps the most detailed accounting of applied ethnography with the action science context."

All of this provided her with an approach to analysis and problem-solving that is concrete, practical, and grounded in the day-to-day realities of organizational life. At the same time, her analyses always take into account the complexities and challenges of leading and managing.

In 2004, The Harvard Kennedy School of Government Institute for Leadership published an article by Dianne about how managers handle difficult events at the intersection of work and non-work issues, such as serious illness and death in the family. That article was later reprinted by Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge.