What is the Exercise of Imagination?
Much of Burnham Rosen Group’s work helps people to better understand themselves and others. An important key to doing that is the Exercise of Imagination, also known as the Picture Story Exercise. In this simple instrument a person looks briefly at a neutral image – such as two people at a table – and is then asked to write a short story about what might be going on. There are six pictures and most people take 30-45 minutes to complete the instrument. Participants in our motive courses, coaching and development programs, and other offerings will take the exercise and receive a profile which highlights the ways one’s thoughts may influence their behaviors.
The Exercise of Imagination is a unique tool is because it is predictive of outcomes, and has been proven to be so in tens of thousands of research studies in the United States, Europe and Asia. Across the globe millions have taken the exercise, including many World Leaders, over the decades of empirical research in predicting human behavior in every day life. Given its extensive history, the Exercise of Imagination also has quite rigorous standards. Professional coders at BRG code each exercise for a variety of implicit motives. These coding systems are based upon decades of empirical research and are so objective that coders agreement with each other on assessing the same stories is in the high 90th percentile.
How does the exercise predict outcomes?
How and why we behave the way we do in everyday life is and which outcomes will lead to success (and which outcomes may not) are critical questions for all of us. What is predictive? How are the dice cast? Nature, nurture? Is the environment shaping our response, and if we change it will we respond differently? These are huge questions. In an attempt to answer some of them psychologists at Harvard and elsewhere in the world looked at psychometric instruments which ask people questions about their values, their behaviors, and their motivation. These studies established that most of these paper and pencil tests – as they are popularly known – validly and reliably predict people’s extrinsic, or conscious, motivation. That is, they can predict why someone will say they behaved the way they did. What they will not do, however is predict how they will actually behave. Why is that, you may ask? It’s because our extrinsic, conscious motives only account for some 30% of our actual behavioral choices. So, for example, two people who – on a paper and pencil test, score high on risk-taking – will not necessarily lean towards high risk behaviors in reality. They may each take low-risks, high-risks, moderate-risks; be similar in risk taking situations; or be entirely different – but they will explain their behaviors similarly through their belief that they are a high-risk-taker.
In contrast, the Exercise of Imagination measures our implicit, or unconscious, motives. Decades of worldwide studies have established that implicit motives account for 70% of behavioral choices and thus they are highly predictive of how people will behave in a given situation and therefore what outcomes they are likely to accomplish. This, of course, is the key to lasting change. Changing our explicit motives is unlikely to actually effect our behaviors in any lasting way, but learning about our implicit motives means we can dramatically influence our behaviors to more readily effect attaining our career, work and life goals.