SYSTEMS THINKING AND GLOBALIZATION

This course equips students with systems thinking as both a conceptual lens and a practical strategy tool. The world’s most consequential management challenges — supply chain fragility, digital disruption, geopolitical decoupling, sustainability transitions — are not complicated problems that yield to more data or smarter linear plans. They are systemic: shaped by feedback loops, time delays, unintended consequences, and emergent behaviour that no single actor fully controls.

Learning Objectives
● Apply the core vocabulary of systems thinking — stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays, and archetypes.
● Construct and interpret causal loop diagrams (CLDs) and identify systemic leverage points.
● Analyse competitive strategy and business model design through a systems lens.
● Map globalization as a system of interconnected value chains.
● Recognise grand challenges (climate change, poverty, health) as systemic phenomena.

Week 1: The Systems Thinking Toolkit
Week 2: Corporate Strategy and systems thinking
Week 3: Globalization as a System
Week 4: Grand Challenges & Sustainability
Week 5: Acting and making decisions in Complex Systems

The credit courses are met by taking part into 6 hours of class work and approximately 8 hours of outside work (reading, studying, assignments, team projects) each week for the duration of the term.

*Attendance is absolutely mandatory: the class will make use of the flipped logic. Materials will be handed out in advance, chapters and articles need to be read before class, the instructor will provide study guides and supporting materials to enable students to be active in the development of the class experience. Students will fail the course if their attendance is lower than 80%. Regular and on time attendance (no late entrance and no early exit are allowed) will entitle the student to 6 points

*In-class participation: students will gain up to 5 points based on their individual participation to in-class discussion. Participation will be assessed as follows:
Outstanding (5 points): frequent participation, substantive insights, visibile and outstanding effort in the preparation of the material in advance;
Good: (3 points) : active participation, good preparation for in-class discussion
Adequate (2 points): Participation to some in-class discussions, occasional preparation for in-class discussion
Unsatisfactory (1 point): the student participated to some in-class discussion, no substantive insights were given, the contributions were negligible, scarce or absent preparation for in-classe discussion.
Non participant (0): no contribution to in-class discussion

*2 reflective journal entries (6 points)
Students will be asked to deliver a self-reflective journal entry in the form of a short video whose prompt and instructions will be given in the class Moodle. The two tasks will be required in week 1 and 5.

*Team project (6 points)
The class will be divided in teams. Teams will work on a project aimed at mapping a system and imagining how it might react if an intervention was made. The team projects will consist of a 10 minutes professional presentation and a parallel report.

*Final exam (7 points):
A 25 minute test on the contents of the course, 15 multiple choice questions.

Lecures, flipped classroom, individual and team projects, case studies