Diana Whitney

From 1995 until 2009 Whitney served as an advisor and facilitator in the design and development of the United Religions Initiative, a global inter-faith organization dedicated to peace. It was for this purpose that Whitney and David Cooperrider created the processes that Whitney entitled the Appreciative Inquiry Summit.

In 1991 Whitney along with Kenneth Gergen, Mary Gergen, Sheila McNamme, Harlene Anderson, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva founded the Taos Institute as a community of scholars and practitioners dedicated to furthering relational practices in the fields of organization development, family therapy and education. There are now over 250 associates around the world.

In her 1980 dissertation, funded by the National Institute of Education, Whitney studied and mapped the processes used for the dissemination of educational innovations. Her relational consultative model of the work of dissemination linking agents was implemented in educational R&D laboratories across the country.

Whitney holds a B.A. in Speech Communication in 1970, an M.A., Classical Rhetorical Theory in 1972, and a PhD in 1980 in Organization Communication, all from Temple University in Philadelphia. Her doctoral thesis was "The Dissemination of Educational Innovations: A Case Study of the NIE Linking Process."

Diana Whitney (born 1948) is an American author, award-winning consultant and educator whose writings – 15 books and dozens of chapters and articles – have advanced the positive principles and practices of appreciative inquiry and social constructionist theory worldwide. Her work as a scholar practitioner has furthered both research and practice in the fields of appreciative leadership and positive organization development. She was awarded Vallarta Institute’s Annual 2X2 (Two by Two) Recreate the World Award.