Xiang,Ding Learning Log

Before the lecture and our group research project, honestly speaking scenario thinking is totally a new thing to me. Making scenarios used to be something just using your imagination to me. However, after the three week lecture and workshop now scenario thinking is really about create the future in my opinion. Scenario thinking gives me a method to analysis the current complicated situation and it is a way of thinking strategically.
The first thing I have learnt in the three week is that everything in the future is the logical result of several current factors and there is not one possibility in the future. Although there are many common senses about what will happen in the future, you should think by yourself why this will happen and what is the reason. Moreover, when we discuss something we should always put it in a complicated system and not forget things behind it. Do not focus on only one tree, but examine the whole forest and the ground which the forest is grown on and other things live in the forest in stead. This will help us to find more possibilities which we never thought about but may happen. If you bet all your investment on one possibility in the future, you would probably lose. But with the researches you did, you would make a more rational strategy of your investment. Though not all the possibilities may happen, at least you would reduce the risk you may face and make you investment more reasonable.
The second thing I have learnt is the technique of system mapping. Because we should study everything in a system, we would find many driving forces would have influences on our research tasks either positive or negative, direct or indirect. System mapping is a way to show all these relationships between the driving forces and our research project and how they influence it. In this stage, it is important not to limit your imagination and not to classify the driving forces at first. But as a help for you to find out as many driving forces as possible and help you think more thoroughly, you can try to find the driving forces in five perspectives which are social, economic, technical, environmental and political. By listing all the related driving forces and showing their relationships and effects, we can get a pretty massy diagram to describe the whole situation. At this stage, massy is good because it gives you more insight into the project. While we were doing our group project, we made mistakes by first trying to classify the related driving forces to different issues without enough researches. Doing this has the risk that we may ignore some implicit but important driving forces. But then we corrected it in time and made a quite complicated network of all the driving forces related to our research topic “The Future of the Internet in China”. Actually we can make this kind of diagram at different levels. At this stage we should be at the lowest level including as many details as possible.
The third thing I learnt is finding the key uncertainty and developing the scenarios. Regarding our group project, after we got the massy diagram we really did not how to find the key uncertainties because there are two many driving forces. After discussing with the lecturer Daniel Erasmus, under his instruction, we finally got our key uncertainties and made the sketch for our scenarios. When you are really puzzled in the complicated system diagram, you had better step back and discuss with your group members what would possibly happen according to the diagram. After you have made several assumptions, you may check which driving force is vital in all the assumptions you made and argue why. At this stage, you would make a simple system diagram just showing the main elements and uncertainties in the system. We finally got three key uncertainties and developed four scenarios. While developing the scenario, there is another useful tool which is making a schedule for your scenario first show what would happen at what time and will cause what at a certain time.
These are the three main points I have learnt during the lecture and the workgroup. Of course the workgroup is another interesting experience for me. It shows the importance of arguing with others and asking others opinions.