60+ years of motivational science, built for today
Most assessments tell you what you’re good at. A smaller number try to tell you who you are. Very few ask the question that actually matters at work, in relationships, and in the choices that shape a life: What moves you to do your best, and why?
That question has been at the center of serious motivational research since the late 1950s. Not trend-driven research. Not a framework built during a pandemic and published two years later. Decades of rigorous, story-based science, built on the analysis of now, more than 1.8M achievement stories gathered from hundreds of thousands of people across industries, continents, ages, and careers.
The platform that delivers that research today is Motivation Code — MCode. But the science behind it is older, deeper, and more thoroughly validated than most people realize when they first encounter it. Understanding where it came from is worth your time, because it explains why MCode works the way it does, and why the results feel less like a report and more like someone finally put language to something you’ve always known about yourself.
Historical Roots of SIMA®
In the late 1950s, Arthur Miller Jr. was working with Bernard Haldane, widely recognized as a pioneer in career counseling. Haldane had observed that people tend to show a recurring pattern of strengths when telling stories about activities they enjoy. Miller found that fascinating — and went deeper.
What he discovered was that these autobiographical stories revealed far more than recurring strengths. They expressed a whole pattern of motivated behavior. Miller developed a methodical way to analyze that data, which he named SIMA® — the System for Identifying Motivated Abilities®. He called the unique structure of behavior it revealed a “Motivational Pattern,” and found that beneath a person’s natural strengths lives an underlying drive that explains not just what they’re good at, but why they want to do it — and how all of it connects.
That underlying drive is what powers every variation of SIMA’s tools and assessments.
Miller’s contemporaries and collaborators included:
- Richard Bowles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute?
- Leadership coach and author Marshall Goldsmith
- Business partner and author Ralph Mattson
- His sons, Kim and Art III, and grandson, Professor Joshua Miller
The Miller family remains deeply involved in SIMA-related work today, including Art’s wife, Nancy, an accomplished and published poet.
What is SIMA®?
SIMA® is a narrative-based, non-psychometric approach to helping people understand their innate motivational patterns. Rather than presenting hypothetical scenarios or asking people to self-select from a list of traits, SIMA works by revisiting real personal stories — moments in a person’s life where they felt genuine joy, success, and satisfaction.
The approach draws from several well-established frameworks:
- Phenomenological: SIMA works with lived experience. People access and describe their own stories, and their language becomes the window into the deep patterns of their lives.
- Narrative: Each person has a unique story to tell, and individuals partly shape their identities through those stories. SIMA helps people frame their experiences, affirm their natural ways of working, and develop new language for understanding themselves.
- Appreciative inquiry and positive psychology: SIMA focuses on where people work well and have been in flow — identifying and building on motivated gifts, not diagnosing deficits.
- Solution-focused: SIMA helps people recognize the depth of their own resources and bring them to bear on real circumstances, looking beyond constraints toward positive possibilities.
How is SIMA® Utilized?
At its height, 22 licensed consultancies across the U.S., England, Sydney, and Amsterdam used SIMA’s tools, bringing motivational insights to executive search, succession planning, leadership coaching, and organizational development.
Over 60+ years, practitioners have analyzed more than one million stories for hundreds of thousands of individuals seeking career growth and personal and professional development. SIMA’s consultants have worked with organizations including NASA, Disney, Merck, IBM, Aetna, and Medtronic — and served more than 600 nonprofits, among them World Vision, the Salvation Army, Compassion International, and World Relief.
The results were compelling. But the process was intensive, highly customized, and difficult to scale. That tension — between the depth of what SIMA revealed and the practical limits of how it could be delivered — set the next chapter in motion.
From SIMA® to MCORE
By 2010, the question wasn’t whether SIMA worked. The question was whether its depth could survive being made more accessible.
Rod Penner, a 20-year Gallup Corporation veteran, and Tony Kroening, a long-time SIMA-trained executive search professional, teamed up to find out. Their goal was to automate the SIMA process without hollowing it out. This is when Dr. Peter Larson, a counseling psychologist and former president of Life Innovations, with deep experience building assessments, joined the team. Peter saw something the others hadn’t fully articulated yet: SIMA already had a long-standing, proven taxonomy of motivational terms. Could those terms serve as psychometric constructs — the foundation for a scalable, validated assessment of motivated behavior? He believed they could.
The MCORE team then expanded to include Arthur Miller III and Dr. Joshua Miller — son and grandson of SIMA’s founder, who would work with Peter to adapt the SIMA glossary into a self-reporting assessment framework.
They built a prototype that captured people’s achievement stories, then evaluated how fulfilling those experiences were across a set of motivational statements — each tied to one of 27 Core Motivations from the SIMA glossary. The result was an assessment that blended a personalized, qualitative approach with a quantitative, psychometric one.
The final piece was validation. Dr. Todd Hall, a clinical psychologist with experience building and validating assessments, joined the team and led the research that confirmed MCORE’s distinctive approach and proved it worked.
Looking forward
In late 2022, we acquired all intellectual property related to SIMA® and the Motivation Code assessment. We’re committed to supporting the work that began more than 60 years ago and bringing the resources needed to expand its reach and impact.
That investment is already taking shape. Working closely with SIMA biographers and certified professionals, we have expanded the set of intrinsic Motivations from 27 to 32 and mapped them to a new framework of 8 Dimensions of Motivation. This new motivational framework makes the research more accessible and more actionable — whether in corporate settings, higher education, ministry, or beyond.
The science has always been exceptional. We’re here to make sure more people can use it.
