The Opera Model

Everything feels like a giant blob

These ques­tions come up every day. And every day, the answers live some­where else — in Excel, Word, Slack, Email, What­sApp, or some­one’s head. The tools are there. The effort is there. But the pieces don’t con­nect.

This is what most grow­ing organ­i­sa­tions look like from the inside: a shape­less over­lap of tools, ques­tions and good inten­tions with no struc­ture hold­ing it togeth­er. Not because peo­ple aren’t try­ing — but because the organ­i­sa­tion has out­grown its own MO (mode of oper­a­tion).

This is a sys­tem matu­ri­ty prob­lem. What got you here won’t get you to the next lev­el.

Most organisations suffer from operational dissonance — but mistake it for a tool problem.

The eas­i­est fix is to reach for anoth­er tool. A new project man­age­ment app. A bet­ter wiki. An AI assis­tant. But adding instru­ments to an orches­tra that can’t hear each oth­er does­n’t improve the sound. It adds noise.

Nev­er­the­less, you sense that some­thing in your organ­i­sa­tion sounds off (or it feels like pure chaos behind the scene).

The better question than “Which tool?”

The Opera Mod­el is the way out of duct-taped tech. Before adding a tool, let’s under­stand what’s real­ly going on. Every organ­i­sa­tion runs on four oper­a­tional dimen­sions:

• How things are done
• Who does what and when
• How a team stays aligned in dai­ly oper­a­tions
• Where the organ­i­sa­tion is head­ing strate­gi­cal­ly

When these four fall out of tune, you get oper­a­tional dis­so­nance — and duct-taped tools are usu­al­ly the first symp­tom.

The Opera Mod­el helps you find the cause(s). Try­ing to fix things too ear­ly by ask­ing “which tool do we need?” will only cement the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of duct-taped tech. The bet­ter ques­tion is “Which of these dimen­sions is bro­ken?” From there, we can devel­op an under­stand­ing of how well the four are work­ing togeth­er.

The orchestra analogy

The idea came to me in 2021 while restruc­tur­ing a Notion work­space that had grown com­plete­ly out of con­trol. I need­ed a way to explain what was miss­ing — and why just adding more doc­u­men­ta­tion was­n’t the answer.

I first wrote about it in Ger­man in 2023 as „Die drei Arten von Wis­sen” and refined it through years of build­ing sys­tems for clients.

The word “opera” comes from the Latin opus, mean­ing “the work”. From this root, the Eng­lish lan­guage inher­it­ed a whole fam­i­ly of words: oper­ate, oper­a­tions, oper­a­tor. When we talk about busi­ness oper­a­tions, we are — with­out know­ing it — already talk­ing about opus.

An opus is not just work. It is a body of work — some­thing built over time, that out­lasts any sin­gle per­for­mance.

That is exact­ly what a well-struc­tured organ­i­sa­tion should be: a well-attuned sys­tem orches­trat­ed by aligned peo­ple, espe­cial­ly true in the age of AI.

What makes a great opera: The Four Dimensions

To cre­ate a sound opus, mean­ing oper­a­tions, four dimen­sions need to play in har­mo­ny. Each needs to under­stand their role and lim­its to stay in sync.

🎼 The Score – knowing how to play

The Score rep­re­sents all the knowl­edge of how things are done in an organ­i­sa­tion. It is the most sta­t­ic of the four dimen­sions — it changes sel­dom, and when it does, it is delib­er­ate.

SOPs, wikis, how-to guides, check­lists, tem­plates, onboard­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion — these all belong to the Score.

It is what keeps the organ­i­sa­tion from start­ing from scratch every time.

🎻 The Musician – knowing who plays and when

The Musi­cian rep­re­sents all the knowl­edge of exe­cu­tion — who does what, and when. This is the most dynam­ic of the four dimen­sions, chang­ing con­stant­ly as projects evolve, pri­or­i­ties shift and dead­lines move.

Project man­age­ment, task own­er­ship, dead­lines and recur­ring todos all belong here.

It is the dimen­sion where things are get­ting done — you can hear and see the music play.

🪄 The Conductor – keeping everyone in sync

The Con­duc­tor rep­re­sents oper­a­tional align­ment — the rules, rhythms and com­mu­ni­ca­tion pat­terns that keep a team in sync day to day. This includes all employ­ees, team lead­ers and man­age­ment.

It is the most flu­id of the four dimen­sions, oper­at­ing almost dai­ly through meet­ings, mes­sages, check-ins and feed­back loops.

The Con­duc­tor defines the rules of engage­ment: which chan­nels are used for what, how deci­sions are doc­u­ment­ed, how meet­ings are run and fol­lowed up. Emails and Slack are used for nudges and quick exchanges — not mul­ti-top­ic threads where top­ics are mixed, deci­sions are buried, or detailed work instruc­tions are giv­en.

Think of the con­duc­tor as a rhythm-giv­er, ensur­ing every­one is in har­mo­ny, with­out branch­ing out into telling musi­cians how to play or what to play.

🎭 The Composer – planning the concert season

The Com­pos­er rep­re­sents strate­gic align­ment — the vision, direc­tion and cre­ative ambi­tion of the organ­i­sa­tion. This dimen­sion belongs to Man­age­ment.

The Com­pos­er plans the con­cert sea­son: which pieces will be played, for which audi­ence, and with what artis­tic inten­tion. Trans­lat­ed into busi­ness: vision, goals, strate­gic ini­tia­tives and the OKRs that mea­sure whether the organ­i­sa­tion is mov­ing in the right direc­tion.

The Com­pos­er also defines the “sound” and “expe­ri­ence” of the organ­i­sa­tion — its brand, cul­ture and cre­ative direc­tion. With­out a Com­pos­er, the orches­tra plays — but nobody knows why, or for whom.

In the ear­ly days of a com­pa­ny, The Com­pos­er is of low impor­tance. But the more clients are served and more musi­cians are hired, the more The Com­pos­er is need­ed to give the enter­prise direc­tion.

Out of Tune Dimensions

The Score – when the organisation freezes

When the Score dom­i­nates, the organ­i­sa­tion becomes obsessed with doc­u­men­ta­tion, stan­dards and rules. Every process needs a pro­ce­dure. Every deci­sion needs a pro­to­col.

Think of the over­reg­u­lat­ed admin­is­tra­tion that gets done noth­ing. The result is a work envi­ron­ment where peo­ple are afraid to act — because there are too many “shoulds”.

There are too many con­tra­dict­ing pro­ce­dures, new hires need a PhD just to dis­sect the instruc­tions and weed through out­dat­ed mate­r­i­al.

The Musician – when musicians play their own notes

When the Musi­cian dom­i­nates, the organ­i­sa­tion is in a per­ma­nent state of doing. Here an extra thing and there an extra loop.

Tasks mul­ti­ply. Projects pile up. Every­one is busy — gen­uine­ly busy — but they can’t see the for­est for the trees.

The team races through inbox­es full of tasks with­out stop­ping to ask whether they are play­ing the right piece. The team is over­worked, dead­lines are missed because they got buried, or the same work gets done twice because tasks were scat­tered across inbox­es, spread­sheets, and heads. And then pri­or­i­ties and dead­lines shift con­stant­ly, result­ing in a dai­ly Rubik’s Cube game for every­one.

In this state, the organ­i­sa­tion con­fus­es busy­ness with progress and more for bet­ter — and won­ders why the team is exhaust­ed by Wednes­day.

The Conductor – the orchestra rehearses forever

When the Con­duc­tor dom­i­nates, the organ­i­sa­tion lives in a per­ma­nent state of coor­di­na­tion. Meet­ings about meet­ings. Threads that touch 10 top­ics. Deci­sions that cir­cle back end­less­ly because no one has the author­i­ty — or the courage — to close them.

Every­one is aligned in the­o­ry. Noth­ing moves in prac­tice.

Peo­ple are stuck in meet­ings, coor­di­nat­ing Slack, What­sApp, inbox­es, and infor­mal water cool­er con­ver­sa­tions. So much ener­gy goes into coor­di­na­tion that there is lit­tle left for doing the actu­al work, or it gets pushed into evenings and week­ends.

The Composer – the orchestra plays beautifully, but in an empty hall

When the Com­pos­er dimen­sion is absent, the organ­i­sa­tion exe­cutes well but with­out direc­tion. The Score is in place. The Musi­cian is active. The Con­duc­tor keeps things run­ning. But nobody has asked:

• Why are we play­ing this piece? What do we want to achieve?
• When should we play what? For whom?
• Are we play­ing for the right peo­ple?
• Where do we want to be at the end of the sea­son?

The symp­toms are sub­tle at first. Good work gets done, but it does­n’t com­pound because it isn’t mea­sured and aligned with the com­pa­ny’s direc­tion.

With­out a Com­pos­er, an organ­i­sa­tion is dri­ven by indi­vid­ual ini­tia­tives, per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion of lee­way, or whoever’s the loud­est gets served first.

Note: The Com­pos­er is the last dimen­sion to acti­vate. When oper­a­tional chaos is high — when the Score is miss­ing, the Musi­cian is over­loaded, or the Con­duc­tor is over­whelmed — it is near­ly impos­si­ble to think strate­gi­cal­ly, so fix the floor first, then com­pose the sea­son; the same sequence applies when you con­sid­er imple­ment­ing AI in your busi­ness, because AI is a mul­ti­pli­er, and you want a strong basis to mul­ti­ply from.

How to get started with The Opera Model

The first step is not to build any­thing. It is to diag­nose to save time and mon­ey.

The Opera Mod­el helps you iden­ti­fy where things are out of tune. With the fol­low­ing ques­tions, you can bet­ter assess the state of each dimen­sion.

🎼 The Score

• Do you doc­u­ment how things are done?
• Can any­one find that doc­u­men­ta­tion with­out ask­ing?
• Is it up to date, and does it reflect real­i­ty?

🎻 The Musician

• How vis­i­ble is the work across your team?
• Does every­one know who is respon­si­ble for what — and by when?
• Can peo­ple man­age their own work­load, includ­ing blocked time for meet­ings and recur­ring respon­si­bil­i­ties?

🪄 The Conductor

• How often does your team sit through some­thing that could have been an email?
• Do you have a struc­tured meet­ing agen­da — and does the team fol­low through on it?
• Are meet­ing notes tran­scribed, action items cap­tured, and con­nect­ed back to the rel­e­vant projects, clients and tasks?
• Do you have guide­lines in place for which com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels are used, and how?

🎭 The Composer

• Does your organ­i­sa­tion have a clear vision and strate­gic goals that every­one knows?
• Are those goals bro­ken down into con­crete ini­tia­tives with own­ers and time­lines?
• Do you mea­sure progress — and do those met­rics actu­al­ly reflect what mat­ters?
• Does your organ­i­sa­tion play great operas? Is your brand, com­pa­ny cul­ture, and vision felt by your employ­ees?

From Diagnosing to Fixing: Building the System

We use The Opera Mod­el in our con­sult­ing work because it helps our clients artic­u­late their pain points and ensures we address all aspects of a busi­ness organ­i­sa­tion with­out becom­ing too tech-abstract.

The Opera Mod­el helps to under­stand what’s work­ing and where things out of rhythm. Because we diag­nose before we pull out the scalpel from the draw­er.

Once we under­stand that, we can trans­late it into a blue­print that tells us what to build, how to train your team and keep the sys­tem in tune as things grow and scale.

With­out analysing your cur­rent oper­a­tions, there’s a risk that sys­tem design becomes ran­dom or focus­es on the wrong dimen­sion — just because it screamed the “loud­est”.

With The Opera Mod­el, every dimen­sion is con­sid­ered to cre­ate a great per­for­mance and The Sys­tem Trans­for­ma­tion is how we make it hap­pen.

When to implement AI

When we help organ­i­sa­tions trans­form with our The Sys­tem Trans­for­ma­tion, we build for an AI-cen­tric organ­i­sa­tion from the start.

How we diag­nose, build, imple­ment and train your organ­i­sa­tion depends on what we’ve iden­ti­fied in the begin­ning.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, your organ­i­sa­tion needs to have a “sound” foun­da­tion of aligned peo­ple, clear process­es, the right tools, and cen­tralised data to pro­pel your com­pa­ny for­ward with AI.

The Opera Model: Our sound approach to understanding your operations

The Opera Mod­el is a tun­ing fork. It tells you where the sound is off so every­one can get back in rhythm.

Most oper­a­tional dys­func­tion does not come from lack of moti­va­tion or inten­tion. It comes from an invis­i­ble imbal­ance between the four dimen­sions that every organ­i­sa­tion needs.

Now you have a name for it:

The Score. The Musi­cian. The Con­duc­tor. The Com­pos­er. Keep all four in bal­ance — and your organ­i­sa­tion starts per­form­ing and fill­ing con­cert halls.

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