An Imaginary Friend

There are a lot of things we leave behind when we grow up: Lego bricks scattered across the living room carpet, the conviction that the monster under the bed has nothing better to do than wait for us to fall asleep, and the strange practice of eating half a packet of biscuits before returning the final few to the cupboard as though our parents won’t notice we’ve eaten any. Imaginary friends usually get filed away on that same list, somewhere between treehouses and the comforting belief that adults know what they’re doing.

Having an imaginary friend as a child isn’t unusual. Children invent people, animals, dragons, superheroes, talking dogs and entire civilisations with remarkably detailed rules and histories, and they do it so routinely that developmental psychologists now treat the practice as ordinary rather than eccentric. Marjorie Taylor’s long-running research at the University of Oregon’s Imagination Lab found that children with imaginary companions are, if anything, less shy than their peers, better able to sustain attention, and no worse at distinguishing fantasy from reality than children without one (Taylor, 1999; Taylor et al., 2004). Most adults couldn’t explain how their local council works without looking it up, yet a seven-year-old can quite easily describe the economic structure of “Planet Blubber” and the judicial powers of Geoff, the giant purple rabbit.

An imaginary friend can be a companion, a co-conspirator, a referee, or, when circumstances require, the unfortunate individual blamed for something broken. Children rarely seem troubled by the boundary between imagination and reality. Adults sometimes assume the line is blurred for them, as though little Charlie genuinely believes Kevin the Invisible Dinosaur is merely camera shy. In practice, the research suggests the opposite. Children generally understand that the companion lives in their imagination while continuing to engage with them as though they were standing in the room (Taylor et al., 1993). They’re not confused or deluded, but they also understand that knowing something is imaginary doesn’t prevent it from being useful, entertaining or meaningful.

Children generally understand that the companion lives in their imagination while continuing to engage with them as though they were standing in the room ... They’re not confused or deluded, but they also understand that knowing something is imaginary doesn’t prevent it from being useful, entertaining or meaningful.

Children aren’t simply playing when they talk to an imaginary friend. They’re rehearsing. Every imagined conversation is practice for a real one, every invented disagreement provides an opportunity to explore conflict without consequence, and every new character offers another way of looking at the world. Taylor and Carlson (1997) found a direct link between fantasy play and the early development of theory of mind, the capacity to recognise that other people hold beliefs, desires and perspectives different from one’s own. The concept was first named by Premack and Woodruff (1978) in their studies of primate cognition, but children begin developing the capacity long before they encounter words such as 'empathy', 'communication' or 'perspective-taking'. What looks like play from the outside is often a fairly sophisticated piece of cognitive work dressed as a superhero.

I remember doing exactly the same thing with my sister when I was young. Behind the bookcase in our bedroom was an entire magical land. Our toys would disappear there when we weren’t looking, setting off on adventures, meeting strange characters and getting themselves into all sorts of trouble. Later, they’d come back and tell us all about what had happened. Of course, we didn’t genuinely believe there was a hidden kingdom wedged between the wall and a piece of furniture. We entered into the story willingly because it made the world bigger, richer and more interesting.

The interesting thing is that we continue using much the same mechanism as adults when we’re at our best, although we give it more respectable names and generally remove the giant purple rabbits before presenting to someone else. Recently, I delivered a Population Health Management course for a mixed group of analysts and managers. As part of the session, I asked the analysts to put themselves in a manager’s position and talk about the pressures, responsibilities and competing demands that managers face. I then turned the exercise around and asked the managers to place themselves in the position of analysts, identifying the frustrations they might experience and the limitations within which they have to work. Neither group was being asked to become the other or abandon its own viewpoint. They were simply being asked to imagine what it might be like to stand somewhere else for a while.

The feedback from the course identified this exercise as one of the most helpful parts of the entire programme. Participants recognised pressures they hadn’t previously considered, constraints they didn’t know existed and frustrations they’d misunderstood. Analysts began to see why managers sometimes asked for things that appeared unreasonable or poorly defined, while managers became more aware of the practical and technical limitations analysts faced when trying to provide what had been requested. The exercise didn’t instantly remove every disagreement or turn the room into a model of permanent organisational harmony, but it did make both groups aware that their own experience represented only part of the picture.

Coaches use this approach to help people work through conflict, mediators use it when relationships have begun to fray, and leadership programmes encourage managers to imagine how a decision looks from the front line while asking front-line staff to consider the constraints under which managers are operating. Neuro-linguistic programming, for instance, has long used exercises built around what practitioners call "perceptual positions," viewing a situation from one's own vantage point, then from the other person's, then from a detached observer's (Grinder & DeLozier, 1987). Psychologists have since studied a close cousin of the same move under the name self-distancing, and found that stepping back from a difficult experience to view it as an observer rather than reliving it first-hand produces clearer thinking and less emotional reactivity (Kross & Ayduk, 2011). Whatever the setting, resolving a disagreement, repairing a team relationship, working out why a conversation went badly, the underlying move is the same: try to see what the world looks like from somewhere other than where you happen to be standing. Children seem to discover this instinctively, long before anybody invites them to a management course to discuss stakeholder engagement over unremarkable biscuits.

Neuro linguistic programming has long used exercises based on what practitioners call perceptual positions, viewing a situation first from one’s own vantage point, then from the other person’s, and finally from the position of a detached observer.

So that raises an awkward question. If this is such a useful way of thinking, why do so many of us abandon it once we’re old enough to believe we know better? I’m not suggesting that adults invent office colleagues and add them to the organisational chart. I’m sure introducing people at a networking event to Dave from Accounts, who exists solely inside your own head, will make the evening memorable but for reasons you probably didn’t intend. What I do mean is something more deliberate: creating an imagined perspective on purpose rather than waiting for disagreement, confusion or failure to force it upon us.

The older I get, the more I notice how rarely we interrogate our own perception of events. Someone behaves in a way we don’t understand, and we decide they’re being unreasonable. A colleague doesn’t reply to an email, and we conclude they don’t care. A manager makes a decision we dislike, and within minutes we’ve constructed an elaborate explanation involving poor motives, questionable competence and lifelong character flaws, all without the inconvenience of any actual evidence. This comes close to what Nickerson (1998) described as confirmation bias, the tendency to notice, favour and remember information that fits the story we’ve already settled upon while discounting anything that doesn’t. Human beings are extraordinarily good at explaining what other people are thinking, although our accuracy rate is unfortunately much less impressive.

Deliberately taking another perspective can interrupt that process. Alternative explanations appear, missing information begins to matter, and the picture generally becomes more complicated but also more accurate. Across three negotiation studies, Galinsky and colleagues (2008) found that people who deliberately adopted the other party’s cognitive viewpoint were better at identifying hidden common ground and reaching agreements that benefited both sides than those who focused primarily on emotional empathy. Feeling empathy for somebody is valuable of course, but understanding what they’re likely to be thinking and why they’re behaving as they are can help more.

The manager may discover that staff aren’t being deliberately difficult but simply don’t understand what’s being asked of them. The analyst may realise that a vague request isn’t necessarily evidence of poor thinking but the result of a manager having to respond quickly to pressures the analyst can’t see. The customer may not be unreasonable at all but may simply be attempting to navigate a process that makes perfect sense to whoever designed it and almost nobody else.

Perspective taking doesn’t require us to agree with another person’s position, nor does it mean pretending that every explanation is equally valid. It simply stops us assuming that our own view is the only one available. That same imagined voice can also be used to challenge our own ideas, which is where things become rather less comfortable.

Perspective taking doesn’t require us to agree with another person’s position, nor does it mean pretending that every explanation is equally valid. It simply stops us assuming that our own view is the only one available.

We spend a surprising amount of time simply agreeing with ourselves. Give the human brain the faintest hint of a promising idea, and it can build an empire by lunchtime, complete with waiting lists, glowing testimonials, and a journalist asking how we first conceived such a revolutionary concept, all before we’ve established whether a single customer wants the thing. Staw’s (1976) classic study of escalating commitment showed how this operates within organisations. Once people have invested time, money, or reputation in a course of action, they tend to continue investing even as evidence against it accumulates, partly because reversing course would require admitting that the original choice may have been wrong.

The sceptic in the room, whose principal contribution sometimes appears to be asking the one question everybody else hoped to avoid, isn’t being negative. They’re usually providing a brake on exactly this pattern. Without challenge, momentum becomes commitment, commitment becomes attachment, and before long the idea is being defended rather than evaluated. Evidence that supports it is celebrated, evidence that contradicts it is explained away, and the person who asks whether any of this is still a good idea becomes strangely unpopular.

People who work alone don’t always have that brake built into their day. Sole traders, freelancers, and remote workers can spend hours inside their own thinking with nobody wandering past the desk to ask who’s actually going to build the thing everybody is excited about, how much it will cost or whether anybody requested it in the first place. An imaginary friend can perform that function. They might represent a customer, a sceptical colleague, a finance director, a service user or the unfortunate person who’ll inherit our brilliant idea once we’ve become bored with it and moved on to the next one. Their value isn’t in supplying answers we don’t possess. It’s in forcing us to ask questions we’d otherwise quietly avoid.

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method fits neatly here (de Bono, 1985). Rather than inventing one fixed personality, we can give the same imagined character a different role according to the kind of scrutiny the idea needs. The White Hat asks what evidence actually exists rather than what we hope might eventually emerge. The Red Hat allows for the inconvenient fact that human beings aren’t spreadsheets and don’t always respond rationally. The Black Hat probes risks, obstacles and weaknesses, while the Yellow Hat considers genuine benefits and possibilities. The Green Hat searches for alternatives, and the Blue Hat steps back to ask what problem we’re actually trying to solve, a question that sounds painfully obvious until we notice how many meetings are devoted to solving problems nobody properly defined in the first place. Give an imaginary friend all six hats and the conversation becomes more useful and rather less comfortable, which is usually a sign that better questions are being asked.

This has become more relevant with the rise of AI, which can generate ideas, organise information and challenge assumptions remarkably well when used deliberately. Used carelessly, however, it can behave rather like a puppy that is keen to help and sometimes so eager that meaningful challenge is replaced by misplaced encouragement. Ask AI whether an idea has merit, and the response may be a well-organised explanation of its opportunities, potential advantages and the circumstances under which it might succeed. That can massage our ego, but it isn’t always what’s needed. Sometimes the more useful response would be, “This is the fourth version of essentially the same idea you’ve had in five years, and the first three didn’t work. What makes this one different?”

Ask AI whether an idea has merit, and the response may be a well-organised explanation of its opportunities, potential advantages and the circumstances under which it might succeed. That can massage our ego, but it isn’t always what’s needed.

That kind of challenge requires memory of a particular sort. It isn’t simply the ability to recall facts, documents or dates, but the experiential residue of failed projects, difficult meetings, overconfident predictions and mistakes that return at three in the morning without invitation. An imaginary friend carries that context naturally because it’s constructed from our own history. It knows where the “bodies are buried” and can dig one up if we’re becoming too enthusiastic. Used correctly, AI can provide some external challenge, but an imagined sceptic created from our own accumulated experience can ask more personal and uncomfortable questions, including “Haven’t we been here before?”

It’s sad that imagination tends to be treated as something we grow out of, filed away alongside comic books, den building and magical kingdoms behind bookcases. Yet it sits at the centre of a great deal of adult thought. Forecasting requires it. Scenario planning requires it. Every attempt to anticipate how another person might react to a decision depends upon it. Gilbert and Wilson (2007) describe the capacity to simulate events we haven’t yet experienced in order to predict how we might feel about them as prospection, arguing that it’s a defining feature of human cognition rather than an occasional decorative flourish. We don’t stop using imagination when we become adults. We simply stop calling it imagination once people begin doing it for a living.

Data analysis offers a good example of what’s lost when that connection goes unrecognised. Analysts can spend enormous amounts of time examining numbers and comparatively little time imagining the people behind them: the person who collected the data under constraints nobody accounted for and the person who’ll receive the completed analysis and somehow has to act upon it. Picture the data collector sitting across the table. What compromises did they have to make? What pressures were they working under? Which definitions that appear precise in the finished dataset were much messier in practice? Then picture the person receiving the report. What decision are they trying to make? What are they likely to misread? What information do they genuinely need, rather than what was most interesting or technically satisfying to analyse?

Those imagined conversations can reveal more than another hour spent examining the data. They remind the analyst that the data didn’t collect itself and that the finished analysis won’t interpret itself either. There are people at both ends of the process, each with pressures, assumptions, limitations and varying degrees of statistical understanding. Imagining those people isn’t an alternative to rigorous analysis. It’s part of making rigorous analysis useful.

The same principle applies to communication more generally. Imagine receiving the email before sending it. Imagine hearing the feedback before delivering it. Imagine trying to follow the instructions without already knowing what they’re supposed to mean. Imagine living with the consequences of a decision before announcing it. Fewer regrettable emails would exist if people ran that small experiment before pressing send.

Imagine hearing the feedback before delivering it. Imagine trying to follow the instructions without already knowing what they’re supposed to mean. Imagine living with the consequences of a decision before announcing it. Fewer regrettable emails would exist if people ran that small experiment before pressing send.

The real value of an imaginary friend was never in the answers it provided but in the questions it forced us to reflect on. To me, expertise seems to be less about accumulating answers and more about knowing which questions are worth asking. The inexperienced often look for confirmation because confirmation feels like progress. Experienced people, though, spend more time hunting for dis-confirmation because that’s where weaknesses, hidden assumptions and genuinely useful discoveries tend to be found. They don’t necessarily possess fewer convictions, but they’re more willing to ask what evidence would prove those convictions wrong.

Perhaps that’s what children understood all along without needing to articulate it. Their imaginary friends weren’t only about companionship. They were a safe way to rehearse conversations, test ideas, explore disagreement and look at the world from somewhere other than the centre of their own experience. The magical land behind our bookcase wasn’t real, but the mental activity involved in creating it certainly was. It allowed my sister and me to enter a world that operated differently from the one around us and return with stories that made our ordinary surroundings feel larger.

Somewhere in growing up, many of us dropped that habit. We became busy defending opinions, explaining other people’s motives and gathering evidence for what we already believed. We learnt to associate certainty with competence and imagination with childhood, even though much of what we call strategy, forecasting, leadership, empathy and critical thinking depends upon the ability to imagine something that isn’t immediately in front of us.

Most of us have more ideas than we know what to do with. What’s usually missing is a reliable way of testing them before too much time, money or pride has gone into the answer. Sometimes that perspective comes from a real person: a coach, a colleague, a mentor or the sceptic at the back of the meeting who asks the awkward question. Sometimes it comes from a structured exercise such as perceptual positions or de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. Sometimes it comes from AI used thoughtfully rather than indulgently. And sometimes, just as it did when we were children, it comes from a conversation that happens entirely inside our own heads.

So we may have spent more effort trying to look like grown-ups than paying attention to what children do rather well. They remain curious where we’ve settled into certainty, move between possibilities before becoming attached to one, and try out different perspectives without worrying that doing so weakens their own. An imaginary friend won’t solve every problem, make a difficult decision disappear or cover their share of the restaurant bill. What it can do is offer another vantage point at the moment we need one, asking what somebody else might see, what we’ve failed to notice and whether the idea we’re currently defending deserves quite as much confidence as we’ve given it.

we may have spent more effort trying to look like grown-ups than paying attention to what children do rather well. They remain curious where we’ve settled into certainty, move between possibilities before becoming attached to one, and try out different perspectives without worrying that doing so weakens their own

In a world where we’re constantly searching for better tools, better systems, more information and more definitive answers, perhaps what we need isn’t another source of reassurance. Perhaps we need to become a little more childlike, recover the willingness to play with possibilities and invite a voice into the conversation that isn’t automatically impressed by everything we say.

Perhaps we simply need to rediscover an imaginary friend.