La Prospective Morphological Scenarios

General morphological analysis is the broad Zwicky-derived technique of decomposing any problem into parameters, listing each parameter's possible values, and exploring the resulting configuration space, used across design, policy, and problem-structuring. Godet's morphological scenarios are a specific scenario-building application of that logic inside la prospective. The distinctive features are that the dimensions and hypotheses are drawn from prior structural analysis (MICMAC) and the elimination of configurations respects the actor strategies and power relations from MACTOR, and that the endpoints are developed into dynamic paths from present to future.

Because the full morphological space is the product of the number of hypotheses across every dimension, it grows multiplicatively and quickly contains far more configurations than anyone could analyse, the vast majority of which are incoherent or impossible. The value of the method comes from disciplined reduction: applying internal-coherence, plausibility, and actor-compatibility filters to keep only the handful of configurations that form believable, mutually distinct worlds. Without rigorous, explicit reduction the enumeration is merely overwhelming, so the elimination criteria are where the analytical judgement and traceability of the method reside.

Morphological construction itself produces coherent qualitative configurations rather than likelihoods, but within la prospective it is often combined with probabilistic tools. In particular, SMIC Prob-Expert can be applied to the underlying hypotheses to elicit and correct expert probabilities and rank scenario combinations by their probability. So while the morphological stage focuses on which futures are coherent and which actors would permit them, the broader toolbox allows the resulting scenarios to be weighted, helping decision-makers distinguish the more from the less probable among the retained set.