Towards Software Support for Collaborative Morphological Analysis

Abstract

Today’s knowledge workers regularly face ill-structured, non-routine wicked problems such as strategy development, product innovation or policy design. Morphological analysis (MA) is a versatile problem structuring method that helps teams to build a shared understanding of an issue, generate solution ideas and support decision-making. However, existing MA software has two major drawbacks given the high prevalence of teamwork in modern organizations: (1) it only provides a single user interface and (2) it neglects established practices to improve group performance and creativity because there is no collaboration support. I propose extensions of the classical process model for morphological analysis to incorporate findings from cognitive and social psychology that may serve as a basis for collaborative MA software implementations and discuss the underlying design decisions.