HIRING

BY ILAN MOCHARI @ILANMOCHARI

3 Interview Questions for Screening InnovativeEmployees

Here's how to hire for what innovation expert Lisa Bodell calls "strategic imagination."

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In their 2009 article for the Harvard Business Review called "The Innovator'sDNA," authors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen share five keyskills that entrepreneurial innovators possess. One of them is "questioning"--specifically, theact of questioning the status quo:

Most of the innovative entrepreneurs we interviewed could remember the specificquestions they were asking at the time they had the inspiration for a new venture.Michael Dell, for instance, told us that his idea for founding Dell Computer sprangfrom his asking why a computer cost five times as much as the sum of its parts. "Iwould take computers apart. . .and would observe that $600 worth of parts weresold for $3,000." In chewing over the question, he hit on his revolutionary businessmodel.

If you're a CEO, your ongoing challenge is getting more "questioners" in your organization.

The problem? On one level, it's the traditional interview process. In traditional interviewers,it's the organization asking the questions. How can you gauge a prospective employee's abilityto ask subversive questions, if all she does during an interview is answer yours?

In a superb post for strategy+business, innovation leader Lisa Bodell, the CEO of futurethink andthe author of Kill the Company, provides 14 interview questions that can help you and your HRdepartment find these questioners. Three of the 14 questions are part of a category Bodell calls"strategic imagination." She defines this as "the ability to dream with purpose and generatenew ideas."

"Dream with purpose," if you read it too fast, can sound like a seductive TED-talk bromide. Butif you unpack it, what it describes is the rare talent of thinking imaginatively, yetsimultaneously being able to find the practical, revenue-generating heart of a creative idea.

Here are three interview questions from Bodell that will help you screen job candidates forstrategic imagination:

1. If you had one month and a $50,000 budget to tackle any project, what would itbe? This question gets to the heart of what some innovative organizations actually allowemployees to do, on a smaller scale. For example, Atlassian, a software company based inSydney, Australia, holds what it calls "FedEx Days." One day each quarter, employees can workon anything related to Atlassian products.

The rub? You have to ship whatever you're working on within 24 hours. Employees then get topresent their projects to the entire company. It's not $50,000, nor is it one month, but it's achance for employees to wave a magic wand and work on anything. Similarly, ConstantContact, a $285-million maker of marketing software based in Waltham, Mass. , holdsquarterly innovation jams and has codified an internal "green light process" to quickly churnthrough whatever ideas employees generate, at the jams or elsewhere.

2. Which external jolts or wild cards have the potential to significantly impact ourindustry? This question gets to the heart of business-model disruption. Perhaps if anincumbent PC maker had asked this question rigorously enough, it would have anticipatedMichael Dell's brilliant disruption, based on the vulnerability Dell discovered in the industry'sstaid pricing model.

3. Which new customer segments will emerge in five years? How will thosecustomers discover our product? This question is the distillation of a provocation fromlegendary management guru Peter Drucker, who asked, "If we weren't already doing it thisway, is this the way we would start?"

The overall idea is the central one behind business-model innovation: That your businessmodel, even if highly lucrative for many years, requires constant revision so yourorganization can reach new customers and anticipate (and ward off) potentially disruptive

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challengers. As Scott Anthony points out in an HBR post, one potential question you can askyourself--in the quest to revise your business model--is, "Which customers can't participate in[my] market because they lack skills, wealth, or convenient access to existing solutions?"

It's no coincidence that Anthony's business model question is similar to Bodell's interviewquestion for screening innovative candidates. You want to hire employees who'll help ensurethe long-term viability of your business. Remember, today's uncomfortable questions drivetomorrow's lasting solutions. The key is finding the employees who'll boldly ask and answerthose questions, when no one else wants to do so.

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