The “Committee” of mgn is a group of people who make decisions in advance.
Hello!
What is Committee?
MGN has been working for a year and a half now to create a “Committee”. Committee” means “committee. It is a small number of members who run for office among the members, and its role is to prepare drafts of internal decisions in advance.
For example, when deciding on Principles, we have a “Summary Committee”. When renewing the corporate site, the “Corporate Site Content Committee” (CCC for short) is established and meets on a regular basis.
Inauguration of the committee system
MGN basically has a policy of “everyone decides together about company matters. We call a Grand Meeting once a month to deal with such decisions. However, there were some projects where it was difficult to proceed while listening to everyone’s opinions, even in a small team of 10 or more people. A typical example is the renewal of Principle and the corporate website.
Basically, we want to get everyone’s opinions, so we all work together during the meeting to create a document on a single topic, but this alone is time-consuming, so an hour at each meeting goes by very quickly. The larger the theme, the longer it takes to work on it at the pace of a monthly meeting. There are many other things we have to meet about, and it is very difficult to coordinate everyone’s schedules. So we had to be creative if we wanted to work on it.
The Grand Meeting was used to report on the progress and to focus on the areas where we really wanted to make decisions together. The Grand Meeting was used to report on the progress and to focus on the areas where we really wanted to make decisions together.
Summary Committee’s specific actions
We use it as a guideline for our own actions. It is not mandatory, but it helps us when we are unsure about something or when we think about the future.
The original ideas that we all came up with were summarized into a total of nine items, and each item was supplemented by the following elements.
Japanese Title
English Title
First line: Sentences that express “action
Bullet list: 2-3 items representing “ideas” and “reasons
We spent approximately two to six hours deciding the details of each item. Sometimes, if an item could not be fully thought out by just the four of us, we would bring it back to the Grand Meeting and have everyone think about it again. As a result, I can say with confidence that we have created a very good product.
Specific actions of the Corporate site Content Committee
This is ongoing in real time as of August 2024. This committee was formed for the renewal of the corporate website, and while we usually spend 3 months or more on a client’s site renewal, when it comes to our own site renewal, we have to find time in between our normal work to work on the project. It has already taken quite a bit of time, but we believe it will be a good one as well!
The decisions to be made are roughly as follows
concept
Overall composition
Rough wireframe
Details of the content to be posted
Rules to maintain uniformity throughout the site
On word choice
In each step, we discussed one idea at a time and put our ideas together.
Good points about the committee
There were a number of good things that came out of actually working on the committee.
Saves time.
Because the number of members participating is small, it simply saves time. For example, a 1-hour MTG with 10 people takes 10 hours, but a 1-hour MTG with 4 people takes 4 hours; not everything is completed in one meeting, so the more times you have more meetings, the more time you save.
Flexible hours.
It is very difficult to coordinate the schedules of each of the 10 members. In fact, not all members can attend even a monthly meeting. The smaller the number of people, the easier it is to schedule. Of course, we are not able to schedule meetings often, but we are able to get together relatively smoothly.
Opinions are less likely to be scattered about.
One of the advantages of having a small number of people is that opinions are less likely to scatter. It is not necessarily better if they do not scatter, but at least they are easier to settle and less likely to derail the conversation. When a certain amount of the preliminary decisions are made in advance, the advantage is that the decisions can be made smoothly.
summary
At mgn, we have a culture of “discussing and deciding together”. As the number of members gradually increased and the number of decisions to be made grew, many difficult situations arose. The committee system was created to solve this problem, and so far it has been working well. I feel that the committee has been able to keep the culture unchanged by making decisions as far as feasible and making the final decision together.
