Case Overview
| Client |
Certified Nonprofit Corporation National Children's Cafeteria Support Center, Musubie |
|---|---|
| Inquiry | We want to identify the organizational issues we should tackle in order to create an environment where members can act more autonomously. |
| Project Overview | Musubie is an NPO that supports children's cafeterias nationwide. Now in its sixth year, its activities have expanded. However, with that expansion, its organizational issues had also become more diverse. To develop an environment where members can act more autonomously, we conducted internal surveys and interviews and created a map that diagrammed the bottlenecks and overall picture of the issues. |
| Period | May 2024 – December 2024 |
About This Project
We visualized the current situation and bottlenecks within the organization to clarify what should be improved in order to create an environment where each member can act more autonomously.
This came from a request by the Certified Nonprofit Corporation National Children's Cafeteria Support Center, Musubie (hereafter "Musubie"). While expanding their activities with donations from supporters and increasing the number of members for those activities, they wanted to build a structure in which diverse members can act more easily within the organization—for example, an environment where new members can quickly fit into Musubie and demonstrate their performance as the organization grows—so that they can generate a greater social impact.
To respond to this request, through regular meetings and interviews with the people of Musubie, we delved into and organized the current state of the organization and visualized its overall picture, as a foundation for considering the requirements needed to develop an environment where members can act more easily.
This project spanned eight months and was carried out in three phases.
In the first phase, we held regular meetings on this matter twice a month and heard about the current state of Musubie's organization and their ideal vision of what the organization should become. We diagrammed the content discussed in each session to align perspectives, visualized the organization's workflows, and discussed where and what might be becoming a bottleneck.
In the second phase, we designed and conducted a survey and interviews for the members. For the survey, we designed the question items based on the workflows identified in the first phase. In addition, while considering the balance of roles among the respondents, we conducted direct interviews with some of them about their responses, gathering more detailed opinions on the background of their current difficulties and on their ideal vision of how they would like Musubie to be.
In the third phase, we compiled the organization's current situation and issues that had emerged so far, organized the causal relationships, and visualized the overall picture and bottlenecks with two diagrams.
The first diagram is the "Organizational Issue Causal Map." This flatly organizes the issues collected through the processes so far and connects the causal relationships between those issues. Organizational issues do not exist in isolation; various factors are intertwined and influence one another. Also, an issue that is important to one person may not be well recognized by other members of the organization. By visualizing the overall picture of such issues, we created this diagram as a tool for everyone to align their perspectives and share the organization-wide issues.
The next diagram we created is the "Organizational Issue Breakdown Map." This places a specific organizational issue that was felt to be particularly significant at the center, and visualizes what issues are linked to that central issue by breaking it down. Unlike the "Organizational Issue Causal Map," this gives centrality to an issue and organizes what issues are causing the particularly important one. This makes it possible to discuss, with a clear focus, what measures should be considered first for the issue you most want to solve.
*Parts of the diagram are blurred.
The two diagrams created this time are based on the voices of some of the Musubie people who were involved in this matter through regular meetings, surveys, and interviews. Therefore, they do not capture all voices and are provisional. Going forward, we hope these diagrams will serve as a common language and a foundation for discussion when thinking about Musubie's organization, leading to a movement in which everyone proactively considers how the organization should be.
At ZUKAI, we support problem-solving for people in companies and organizations facing complex issues by confronting the premises and using the power of structuring to create diagrams. If you are interested, please see our programs.
ZUKAI programs: https://zukai.co/division