This quarter's Spotlight focuses on Dr. Monica Worline, Co-Founder of Vervago and assistant professor of organization & management at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.

Monica has followed an unusual track to the study of organizations, which is her passion. She grew up in Elko, Nevada, but she knew from a very young age that she wanted to have experiences outside of small-town life. Her dreams of exploring the world started coming true when she was accepted at Stanford University, where she studied English and Feminist Studies. It was at Stanford that her path first crossed with Dennis Matthies, Vervago’s fellow co-founder. Monica jokes that she really got to know Dennis when she applied for a job as a Resident Assistant in the dormitory where he served as a Resident Fellow for over a decade. Dennis’ vigorous interviewing process included 3 to 4 hours of intense one-on-one meetings. Feeling confident that after all of that interviewing, Monica would get the position, “he had the audacity not to hire me,” she says. “My working with Vervago is the sweetest revenge for him not hiring me the first time around!”

After Stanford, Monica worked in several Silicon Valley companies, and ultimately helped with the start-up of a software venture. One afternoon just as she was contemplating her next step, Monica bumped into Dennis on the seaside walk in Sausalito, “and it just so happened that, in a moment of divine irony, Dennis was walking with the person who got the RA job instead of me,” Monica explains. “Well, of course, we had to strike up a conversation under those conditions.” Dennis told Monica of his interest in taking Precision Questioning to the workplace setting and wanted to hear about her experiences with start-up companies. Those conversations led them to co-designing and teaching a PQ class for adults in the workplace.
 
While co-teaching and writing articles about PQ, Monica decided to pursue a Ph.D. in organizational psychology, while Dennis left Stanford and moved to Seattle to work more closely with Microsoft as they were implementing PQ throughout the organization. As luck would have it, the market demand for PQ workshops grew to be more than Dennis and Monica could handle, and so, Vervago was born.

Today, Monica loves research, teaching, and writing about organizations, emphasizing psychology and human aspects of work. She continues to serve as an advisor to Vervago, and she believes that PQ has tremendous value for helping people sharpen their intellectual skills. “I see the obvious benefit to the bottom line of more efficiency and higher quality conversations, along with the side benefit of encouraging people to question the standards around them and raise issues when something in the workplace isn’t going as it should. Having command of questions not only makes economic sense, it also makes it easier to be ethical, courageous, and committed to what you believe in at work. It is a tool that has direct business benefits and a wide array of social benefits at the same time.”

click here to view Sharper Minds newsletter - Issue: 2 (May 2007)