Have you ever watched someone create an exceptional collaboration with a customer or a colleague through the richness of their questions and the clarity and credibility of their communication? Ever observed an executive scan a complex issue and get to its most vital terrain with just a few generative questions and highly attuned answers?
We have. And it has moved us to spend much of the last 30 years learning, researching, and teaching others to engage in more powerful inquiry.
Our work is the product of decades of collaboration within many of the most respected companies and universities globally. Our mission is to empower teams and individuals to bring their best work to life through better questions, efficient communication, and deeper collaboration.
Vervago, Inc. is the developer of the world’s most complete and practical question framework, emerging from 25 years of research at Stanford University. Teaching this framework to leaders in every corner of the world since 1995, we have discovered that people gain insight into their thought process when they learn the 7Categories of Questions and 4Practices of Answering. The byproduct of this increased awareness is the ability to ask precise questions that get to the heart of business issues faster, and the ability to communicate clearly and concisely in collaboration with others.
These two skills make solving complex business challenges vastly easier. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us were never taught a memorable and repeatable approach to doing these things. The problem sets and logic routines we learned in college, or the “5 why” question technique that we may have learned on-the-job, aren’t practical tools for efficiently solving real-world problems. Numerous organizational researchers and business experts extol the virtues of questions, but few offer insight into how, exactly, to ask better ones.
Today’s workplace presents us with possibilities for individual and team growth that are vastly more expansive than anything experienced by previous generations. We have access to more information and more communication capacity than at any other time in history. Yet in the midst of such riches, it is easy to become distracted or overloaded. The need for focused, deep thinking and effective, efficient communication is growing just as quickly as our access to information.
We are all capable of bringing out our best thinking by tapping into the engine of our learning – curiosity. Even so, too many of us buy into the belief that our limits are written in stone. We assume our analytic and social intelligence as fixed, even though a growing body of evidence suggests that – by cultivating our curiosity – we can build our analytic and our social capabilities over the course of our careers. Pairing more precise questions with more powerful answers launches us on a learning journey that can take us as far as we want to go.
We are glad you are interested in new ways to discover your best thinking and grow your collaborative potential. We invite you to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.