Case Study Overview
| Client |
NPO National Kodomo Shokudo Support Center Musubie |
|---|---|
| Inquiry | Identify organizational issues to address to create an environment where members can work more autonomously. |
| Project Overview | Musubie is an NPO that supports kodomo shokudo (children's cafeterias) nationwide. Now in its sixth year, its activities have expanded. However, this expansion has brought diverse organizational challenges. To create an environment where members can work more autonomously, we conducted internal surveys and interviews, and created a visualized map of the bottlenecks and the overall picture of the issues. |
| Duration | May 2024 - December 2024 |
About this Project
We visualized the current state and bottlenecks within the organization to determine what improvements were needed to create an environment where each member could work more autonomously.
The National Kodomo Shokudo Support Center Musubie (hereinafter referred to as Musubie) consulted us regarding their desire to create a system that would allow diverse members to work more easily within the organization, such as creating an environment where new members could quickly adapt to Musubie and perform effectively, as their activities expanded through donations from supporters and their membership grew. This would enable them to generate a greater social impact.
In response to this consultation, through regular meetings and interviews with Musubie, we deeply explored and organized the current state of the organization and visualized its overall picture. This served as a foundation for considering the requirements needed to create an environment where members could work more easily.
This project spanned 8 months and was divided into three phases.
In the first phase, we held bi-monthly regular meetings to discuss the current state of Musubie's organization and its ideal future. We visualized the organization's workflow and other aspects by diagramming the content discussed in each meeting and aligning perspectives, while discussing what might be causing bottlenecks.
In the second phase, we designed and conducted surveys and interviews with members. For the surveys, we designed questions based on the workflow organization identified in Phase 1. Additionally, we conducted direct interviews with a select group of respondents, balancing by position, to delve deeper into the background of their current problems and their ideal vision for Musubie, based on their survey responses.
In the third phase, we summarized the current state and issues of the organization that had emerged, organized their causal relationships, and visualized their overall picture and bottlenecks using two diagrams.
The first diagram is the "Organizational Issue Causal Map." This map flatly organizes the issues collected throughout the process regarding organizational challenges and connects their causal relationships. Organizational issues do not exist in isolation; various factors are intertwined, influencing each other. Furthermore, some issues that are important to one person may not be widely recognized by other organizational members. By visualizing the overall picture of such issues, this diagram was created as a tool to enable everyone to share and align their perspectives on the organization's challenges.
The next diagram created was the "Organizational Issue Decomposition Map." This map places a particularly significant organizational issue at its center and visualizes which issues are linked to that central issue by breaking it down. Unlike the "Organizational Issue Causal Map," this diagram emphasizes the centrality of an issue and clarifies what kinds of issues are causing the particularly important issue. This allows for focused discussion on what initial actions should be considered to solve the most pressing problems.
*Some parts of the diagram are blurred.
The two diagrams created this time are based on feedback from some Musubie members who participated in regular meetings, surveys, and interviews for this project. Therefore, they are provisional, as not all feedback could be collected and visualized. We hope that these diagrams will serve as a common language for discussing Musubie's organization and become a foundation for a movement where everyone proactively considers the ideal state of the organization.
Zukai Soken supports problem-solving for companies and organizations facing complex challenges by addressing preconditions and visualizing them using the power of structuring. If you are interested, please see our program.
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