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Ask questions to observe character
Questions that read character
Take a question like whether you could win any argument if you wanted to, or whether you feel better than others when you're honest with yourself. Nobody scores these. What shows is whether the person is assertive and opinionated, and whether they would rather convince the listener than give the polite answer.
The brutal scenario
The same goes for a deliberately brutal scenario: a cofounder quits, a competitor raises $50 million, social unrest is rampant, and home life is rocky. Asked to name three opportunities that would come out of it, most founders will offer bad ideas, since most ideas are bad anyway. What shows is the enthusiasm, creativity, and optimism behind them.
Where execution gets tested
Execution gets examined later, during the residency, so these early calls underwrite character. The questions are a way to see how someone thinks and what they're made of.
How do hypothetical scenarios reveal character?
Industrial psychologist Gary Latham and colleagues developed the situational interview around 1980, asking candidates what they would do in a described scenario. The answer shows how a person reasons and what they value, not only what they have already done. Meta-analyses of hiring research have found that structured formats like this predict job performance better than unstructured conversation.
Why do pre-mortem scenarios work?
Psychologist Gary Klein popularized the pre-mortem, in which a team imagines a project has already failed and explains why. A 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that imagining an outcome as already having happened increased people's ability to identify reasons for it by about 30 percent. Klein described the technique in the Harvard Business Review in 2007. The brutal-scenario question borrows the same trick of reasoning from a bad outcome.
Why does optimism matter under pressure?
Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania studied how people explain setbacks to themselves. In a study with Peter Schulman at MetLife, published in 1986, insurance agents with an optimistic explanatory style sold about 37 percent more than pessimistic agents over their first two years. Agents in sales face constant rejection, and optimists treat each rejection as temporary. The pessimistic agents also quit at a higher rate.
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