General Morphological Analysis
General morphological analysis (GMA) is a method for structuring and exploring the total set of possible configurations of a complex, multi-dimensional problem that cannot be reduced to numbers. Devised by the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the mid-twentieth century and formalized for policy and futures work by Tom Ritchey, it begins by laying out a problem as a 'morphological field' — a set of parameters, each with several discrete value-states — whose combinations define every conceivable solution. Because that combinatorial space is usually enormous, the method's decisive step is cross-consistency assessment: experts judge every pair of states for internal contradiction, and contradictory pairs prune the field down to a far smaller set of internally coherent configurations that can actually be examined.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Ritchey, T. (2011). Wicked Problems - Social Messes: Decision Support Modelling with Morphological Analysis. Springer. · DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-19653-9
- Bishop, P., Hines, A., & Collins, T. (2007). The current state of scenario development: an overview of techniques. Foresight, 9(1), 5-25. · DOI 10.1108/14636680710727516
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.