Lianzhuang Qu Learning Log
For this course our group chose “Global village” as our topic. On the first sight, it was an exciting one, because we thought we could use our imagination to create what will the world look like in 2020: a world with robots everywhere, convenient space transportation for common people, or the disappearance of poverty. But as we approached, we understood that this topic was too broad for to analyze driving forces we have to understand almost every aspect of the current world including economy, technology, policy, and culture. So we decided to focus on two issues which were economy and technology. I was in the charge of economical things. I found that the globalization of economy depends on five activities: international investment, international finance, international production, regionalization of economy, international trade. In order to explain the relationships of these things with globalization, I had to have a general idea of micro-economy and macro-economy. This is because international trade and international production which is also viewed as result of the international trade mainly deal with micro-economy for they aim at optimization of resources and maximization of profit. The popular theory for the existence of international trade is comparative advantage theory which was first described by Robert Torrens in 1815. While international investment and international finance concentrate on currency, exchange rate, and barriers such as quotes, tariff. So it is necessary for me to understand macro-economy to explain these two issues. Here, I have to admit that I learned a lot about economy due to our topic. The most challenging part was how to decide the relationships among all factors and choosing the high leverages to decide scenarios. I believe it is this part gives us insight into the possible outcomes of the world in 2020, should it be a village as described by McLuhan, or a world of polars or the revival of nationalisim. To illustrate what I got from the topic I draw a diagram as follows.
I first knew scenarios from the course of software engineering for UML diagrams a few monthes ago, and then I approached it again in the corporate finance scenario analysis. But they are different from what I learned from this course becuase both of them mentioned above are concentrate on special problems using special techniques. In this course, scenario thinking is a much broader way of looking at things. However, what did learn from the course or in other words what is my understanding of scenario thinking? There are three things that I think is important. First and foremost, scenario thinking offers a different way looking at world issues just as the advertisement of Adidas goes” Nothing is impossible”. So do not just take things for granted, just because it is now the main trend then it will rule the world? No, stop and think about the things behind it. First look at the important things you can think of, and then look for more detailed information by research questions. After this pick up the most important ones or ones that have the most important impact on the system to see what can happen.
Second, we should concentrate on the high level uncertainties not all of the uncertainties. Why? I think there are two reasons contribute to the answer. The first one is considering all of the uncertainties are two time-consuming and energy-consuming. There are at least sixty uncertainties for our topic, so it is almost impossible to take into account every one of them. The second reason is that the scenario thinking analysis is used to supply solutions. Therefore, many possible outcomes will confuse the management. It is more useful to concentrate on most important and possible ones. Then there is another question, how to identify the high level uncertainties? The rule here is to find those that have comparative more relationships with others. For example, in our group we think the national government is a high level uncertainty, for it has impact on local economy, regional economy, international economy, culture and technology.
Third, I learned how to draw the system diagram. At the beginning our group just thought of the our topic on more general levels, for example we just draw five general driving forces in economy such as international investment and international trade. Then we are stuck there for it seems that the map is so easy and clear that we have nothing to do. Then we realized that we need to think of things such as organizations behind them and the relationships among all of them. For instance, we now knew that the international finance is affected by international finance market, IMF, national economy structure, exchange rate and so on. Then we came to a really messy map. Although we had almost 50 factors in our messy map, we did get quiet a clear idea about the possible development of global village because this map gave us a deep understanding of the relationships among all of these factors and how they affect each other both directly and indirectly.
All in all, I like this course very much, for it widens my vision and it is different.