What Is the Objective Personality System (OPS)?

If you’ve ever looked into personality systems like MBTI, chances are you’ve asked yourself at some point:
“Why do people type themselves differently every time?”
Or: “Why do so many people end up identifying with the same few types?”

The Objective Personality System (OPS) was created as a response to that problem.

The limits of self-reporting

Most well-known personality systems rely heavily on self-reporting. You answer questions about yourself, your preferences, and your motivations. The issue isn’t that this approach is useless — it’s that humans are poor judges of their own patterns, especially when ego, justification, or aspiration get involved.

We tend to describe who we believe we are, or who we want to be, rather than what we consistently do under pressure.

OPS starts from a different assumption:
if personality patterns are real, they should be observable in behavior, not just reported internally.

What OPS claims to be doing differently

The Objective Personality System is a personality typing framework developed by Dave and Shannon Powers. Instead of using tests or self-typing, OPS relies on behavioral observation over time.

People are typed by looking at:

• Repeated decision-making patterns

• What someone prioritizes under stress

• Where their attention and energy consistently go

Multiple trained observers are expected to reach the same conclusions independently. That process is where the term objective comes from — even though, strictly speaking, we are still dealing with psychology, interpretation, and human judgment.

So while OPS aims to be more objective than self-report systems, I don’t personally consider it truly objective in the scientific sense. I would describe it instead as an attempt to reduce subjectivity, not eliminate it.

Personality as trade-offs

Rather than describing people with broad traits, OPS breaks personality down into binary trade-offs, called coins.

For example:

• Do you prioritize yourself or your group when making decisions?

• Do you focus more on gathering new information or organizing what you already know?

The idea isn’t that people only do one side. Everyone uses both. What matters is which side someone overuses, and which side they consistently avoid or struggle with.

In OPS, personality isn’t about what you’re capable of — it’s about where imbalance shows up over time.

Why this approach appeals to some people

One of the reasons OPS attracts attention is that it puts less emphasis on general personality descriptions and more emphasis on recurring difficulties and blind spots.

Rather than asking “What am I good at?”, OPS often leads to questions like:

• What do I repeatedly avoid?

• What kind of problems exhaust me the fastest?

• What patterns keep showing up when things go wrong?

This makes it especially useful for self-development, understanding conflict patterns, and explaining why growth feels uncomfortable in predictable ways.

How OPS relates to systems like MBTI

OPS uses familiar elements such as Thinking, Feeling, Intuition, and Sensing, but it doesn’t stop at 16 types. By layering additional distinctions, OPS ends up describing 512 possible type variations.

The goal isn’t complexity for its own sake — it's precision. Two people can share the same MBTI type and still be wired very differently in energy management, communication style, conflict behavior, stress responses, and decision-making priorities. OPS exists to explore those differences.

What this series will explore

This post is only a starting point.

In future posts, I’ll break OPS down gradually:

• What “objective typing” actually means in practice

• The main personality coins and human needs

• Why people loop, clash, or get stuck

• How a full OPS type is constructed

Each post will introduce one idea at a time, without assuming prior knowledge or blind acceptance.