Opera

Would you like your meetings to be filled with excitement and creativity? Would you like the people in your meetings to be committed to the decisions made in the meeting? If you say yes, you probably should continue reading.


When the meetings are studied, about 50% feel the quality of their meetings is low or fairly low. 30 years ago I also made some qualitative studies of meetings, and I got similar results. The most unsatisfied of the meetings were the people, who spoke the least at the meetings. They also felt the least committed to the outcome of the meetings.


Why some people then don’t speak up in a conventional meeting and have their say? And why some people seem to comment almost all the time in meetings regardless of the actual value of their input? I understood the answers to these questions when I familiarized myself with a model dealing with psychological preferences of people, namely the MBTI, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI was extrapolated from the typological theories proposed by Carl Gustav Jung. Among other things, the MBTI divides people to two main groups of roughly equal size: The introverted and the extraverted. I realized that conventional meetings favour the quick-reacting outspoken extraverts, and discourages the more inward-directed and quietly thinking introverts.


Based on this thinking, I started to develop new working methods in the 1980’s. The aim was to develop methods that would allow for the introverted people in planning and decision-making processes in meetings – and at the same time, would ”force” the extraverts sit back and think a bit more during the meetings. After dozens of trials, a meeting process called Opera was developed. The method was quickly adopted by hundreds of organizations.


Later, we have been studying the quality of the Opera meetings. The feedback from the Opera participants has been on completely different scale compared to traditional meetings. Especially, the introverted people have been praising the method.


In this book, both the methodology and the psychological principles behind Opera are described in detail. It is the most important to understand is the latter, giving the reader an opportunity to understand why he or she should or should not act in certain way as a facilitator of a meeting.


There are more and more meetings in the workplace today. It is easy to predict that the flood of meetings is not about to decrease in our calendars. Therefore, the Opera method is now more current than ever before during its 30-year history. 


I hope you enjoy reading this book and find a way to revolutionize the productivity and individual commitment in your meetings!


Kari Helin