Morphological Analysis (MA), which means “the study of forms” is well established as a method for modelling structural relationships between objects and phenomena in a number of scientific fields including botany, linguistics, geology and mathematics as well as social problems including forecasting, defence planning and political problem-solving.
A generalized version of the method was originally proposed by Swiss-American physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974).
Strong similarities in the basic conceptual framework between Ethelo theory and morphological analysis place them in the same family of analysis. However, Ethelo theory was developed independently and contains several concepts not found in any morphological framework. It is perhaps best framed as an extension of morphological analysis.
What is Morphological Analysis?
Morphological analysis allows a decision space to be expressed as a set of issues, each of which contains a set of options. Each potential decision outcome is expressed as a set of options containing one option from each issue. For example, we might have 5 pizza topping options, and 3 pizza sizes - the toppings and sizes are issues with 5 and 3 options respectively. It is therefore associative, mapping n options to a space of x1*x2*...*xn potential outcomes where xi is the number of options in issue i. This one-to-many mapping sets MA apart from bijective systems such as MCDM (multi-criteria decision-making) which maps n options to a space of n potential outcomes.
Constraints in MA are expressed as XOR (either-or) relations between options, which defines a test to determine whether outcomes are valid. Outcomes which contain options in an XOR relationship to each other are invalid.
How is Ethelo similar?
Ethelo resembles MA in its one-to-many mapping of options to outcomes, where options are grouped into sets. The XOR relationship between members of the same set means that there can be a multiplicity of potential outcomes - far more than the sum of the constituent options.
How is Ethelo different?
Ethelo theory contains several elements which are not found in MA.
- Unlike MA and like MCDM, Ethelo allows multiple criteria to be applied in the evaluation of options, and weighting of different criteria and issues.
- Ethelo extends the concept of outcomes from one-option-per-issue to any number of options per issue, along with a more generalized concept of constraints (not merely XOR) with global variables and boundaries.) The result is a much larger solutions set. Therefore, whereas the size of the solution set for MA is x1*x2*...xn, the size of potential outcomes in Ethelo theory is 2^n.
- Ethelo enables option evaluations by multiple participants with different levels of influence and provides a method of integrating those evaluations that can accommodate ideas of fairness. MA is one-person.