Heuristic
Prune impossible combinations before judging attractive ones
Remove contradictions first; preference can wait.
When it fits
- A combinatorial option space is large enough that exhaustive comparison is noise.
When to avoid it
- Over-aggressive pruning can erase invention. Mark uncertain incompatibilities and revisit them when a new mechanism could resolve the conflict.
Why it matters
Apply hard compatibility constraints to eliminate combinations that cannot coexist. Keep the rule for each exclusion visible. Only after structural contradictions are removed should the team compare attractiveness, cost or expected value among survivors.
An example
An offline-only architecture cannot use a cloud-only transcription dependency; exclude that pair before debating interface preference.
Check your result
Every eliminated combination has an explicit incompatibility rule rather than 'we don't like it.'
Keep this limit in mind
- Over-aggressive pruning can erase invention. Mark uncertain incompatibilities and revisit them when a new mechanism could resolve the conflict.
Evidence and sources
General Morphological Analysis structures a multidimensional, often non-quantifiable problem space by defining parameters and investigating combinations and relationships among parameter states.
Morphological analysis structures a conceptual space; it is not a causal model and can still omit important dimensions or options.
Problem structuring using computer-aided morphological analysis · Abstract and method description