La Prospective Morphological Scenarios

Within the French school of la prospective developed by Michel Godet, morphological scenario construction is the integrating stage that turns the outputs of structural and actor analysis into a small set of coherent images of the future. Building on Fritz Zwicky's morphological method, Godet decomposes the studied system into a set of dimensions or components, attaches to each a few mutually exclusive hypotheses about how it might evolve, and treats the Cartesian product of these hypotheses as the morphological space of all conceivable futures. Because that space is combinatorially large, the method's analytical work lies in reducing it: pruning combinations that are internally incoherent, implausible, or incompatible with the strategies of key actors, until a handful of contrasted, self-consistent scenarios remain. Distinct from general morphological analysis, this is the scenario-building application that consumes the variables identified by MICMAC and the actor positions mapped by MACTOR.