There’s a leadership conversation we keep skirting in the Caribbean.
Everyone is willing to assess the organization. Assess the team. Assess the culture. Assess the managers. But the person who shapes the emotional, psychological, and strategic weather system of the entire enterprise remains… untouched. Untouched, unexamined, and often unadvised.

It’s not because our leaders don’t want to grow. It’s because the mirror they need isn’t widely popular in the Caribbean at the C-Suite level.

To understand the psychology, we first have to understand the tool.

What Has Been Available All Along

SIMA — the System for Identifying Motivated Abilities — is not a new assessment. It’s one of the earliest and most respected approaches to understanding how humans actually create value. Before corporate personality tests. Before leadership style questionnaires. Before competency matrices.

SIMA emerged from the work of Arthur F. Miller Jr., a vocational psychologist who believed that if you studied a person’s real-life accomplishments — not their opinions about themselves, not their CV, not their job title but their stories of impact — you could decode the motivational architecture that drives them at their best.

And he was right.

What SIMA is

At its core, SIMA is a narrative-based diagnostic that extracts:

• A person’s deepest motivational drivers
• How they pursue goals
• How they behave under pressure
• What energizes and drains them
• The conditions under which they thrive
• Their natural leadership blueprint

It requires a trained assessor, a long-form interview, and detailed coding of achievement stories — one by one.

Who Uses SIMA Internationally

For decades, SIMA has been used globally for:

• Executive search and board-level placement
• Succession planning
• Leader selection
• Executive coaching
• Organizational design
• Cultural diagnostics

Across the US, Europe, and Asia, SIMA is the tool you bring in when you need the truth — not the performance. Boards rely on it. Executive teams use it. Search firms depend on it. Leadership institutes teach it. Because when a decision involves a billion-dollar business unit, a healthcare system, a mission-critical nonprofit, or a C-suite seat… guessing is not an option.

This was the leadership mirror.

But it is rarely used in the Caribbean.

Why? Because the original SIMA process cost thousands to tens of thousands of U.S. dollars per leader. And because it required emotional vulnerability in cultures where leaders are expected to project certainty, not introspection. So the mirror remained out of reach.

The Backstory: How SIMA Became MCODE

What changed the landscape wasn’t a new idea. It was accessibility.

Arthur F. Miller Jr.’s grandson, Joshua Miller, helped modernize the SIMA philosophy keeping the motivational lineage alive, producing MCODE, a digital evolution of SIMA’s research.

MCODE took the essence of SIMA:

• motivational fingerprint
• achievement story analysis
• role-fit insight
• leadership behavior patterns

…and made it scalable, affordable, and deployable across whole organizations.

• It preserved the rigor but removed the barrier.
• It kept the truth but removed the costliness.
• It held the depth but removed the intimidation of the multi-hour interview.

MCODE became the on-ramp that SIMA never had — the democratized version of a deeply specialized science.

And I stand here not as a curious observer but as an MCODE Legacy Coach — part of that early adoption wave that recognized what this tool could unlock in our region. I have seen, again and again, what happens when leaders finally understand how they actually lead… versus how they believe they lead.

Which brings us to the Caribbean.

Why Caribbean Leaders Still Resist the Mirror

Once you understand the history of SIMA and the accessibility of MCODE, the Caribbean resistance becomes clearer — and more human.

We don’t avoid assessments because we’re uninterested in development.
We avoid assessments because our leadership psychology was shaped by a unique brew of history, hierarchy, and survival.

1. Assessments feel like exposure

Leadership here is often tied to self-preservation, not self-revelation.
Assessment feels like opening the armor.

2. Hierarchy is still a shield

Being evaluated by someone “below” you in a small society feels culturally inverted. Hierarchy remains a form of protection.

3. Coaching is still seen as remedial

Leaders approve coaching for their managers, not for themselves. Because in their minds, “coaching” implies something is broken.

4. Isolation at the top

Caribbean leaders have no safe place to be uncertain.

• Not with boards.
• Not with teams.
• Not with peers.
• Self-examination feels risky.

5. Small societies amplify vulnerability

If a leader takes an assessment, who will hear about it? Who will misinterpret it? Who will weaponize it?

So leaders stay unexamined. And organizations keep treating symptoms beneath the one person who generates the conditions.

But Here’s What This Means for Our Region

SIMA showed the world how to decode leadership from the inside out.
MCODE made that insight accessible. And now, for the first time, Caribbean leaders can access deep, evidence-based motivation diagnostics without the psychological or financial thresholds that once made it impossible.

This is our moment to shift:

• from training everyone except the leader
• to aligning the leader so everyone else can finally grow
• from patching culture
• to understanding the architecture holding it in place
• from demanding resilience
• to designing roles around how people naturally create value

Leadership transformation in the Caribbean will not happen because we run more workshops. It will happen the day our leaders sit in the chair, take the mirror, and finally let themselves be seen.

Not judged. Not corrected. Seen.

And when that shifts…everything downstream shifts.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where in your leadership have you been investing in everyone else’s development while quietly avoiding your own? And if your organization were redesigned around your true motivational architecture instead of your inherited habits, what would immediately shift?hip have you been investing in everyone else’s development while quietly avoiding your own? And if your organization were redesigned around your true motivational architecture instead of your inherited habits, what would immediately shift?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.