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.