A business-school student sits in his first module and sees a table. A hard decision goes in as rows and columns, and numbers go in the cells. He tells the story on the podcast Think Like a Scientist: he was delighted. Usually a problem with no clear answer freezes him. But as he filled in the table, he already knew what he wanted, often before he finished the sums.
Vladimir Spiridonov, a professor and head of the Cognitive Research Laboratory at RANEPA's Institute of Social Sciences, heard this and agreed at once. What the host had met, he said, was a cousin of the morphological box, and it deserves its fame.
Here is what it changes for you. A problem that arrives as a fog of unclear details can be turned, in 30 to 40 minutes, into something you can look at. Even if the table gives you no answer, you have learned how the problem is built. Most of the time it also hands you a hint about where to go next.
The trouble with a real problem is that it comes badly organised. It is stuffed with details nobody has sorted, and some of them are not obvious at all. So where do you start? Spiridonov's answer is the dullest one available: write the situation out in its component parts, and do it systematically, not at random.
The simplest way to start, and morphological analysis is good at the starting stage, is really to write the problem situation out by some components, and to do it systematically, not randomly.
самый простой способ начать, а морфологический анализ хорош в стартовых позициях, это действительно расписать проблемную ситуацию по каким-то составляющим, причем сделать это систематически, а не случайно.
— Vladimir Spiridonov, Think Like a Scientist, 48:27
The standard example, which he says wanders from one textbook to another, is a new way to heat a room. List the principles by which warmth can reach a flat. List the devices that carry those principles out. Put one list along one edge of a sheet and the other along the other edge. Now mark the cells that engineers have already filled with real systems.
The empty cells are where it gets interesting. Combine the same elements in ways nobody has built, and you get heating schemes that do not exist yet. Some may be good, some not. But you are now looking at them, and before the table you were not.
The method belongs to Fritz Zwicky, the astronomer, and Spiridonov is candid about what he does not know. He thinks Zwicky used it to classify galaxies, but he says plainly he is not sure. The host added a detail: Zwicky also held patents, among them aerospace ones involving fuels. Spiridonov hadn't known that. A man who sorted galaxies and invented things might well have wanted a way to sort possibilities too.
The best part, Spiridonov says, is that Zwicky made it a method for one head. A box can be built by a whole team, but one mind is enough to split a situation into parts and see how they fit together. It is also cheap. Forty minutes is no real loss, and even a failed table leaves you with the habit of analysis.
Research on design tells a similar story about the method. A 2024 paper from the DRS Biennial Conference Series, by Liuqing Chen, notes that designers use morphological analysis because it breaks a design problem into pieces in an orderly way, and that this improves the completeness and variety of the solutions. In the same year, a study in the Proceedings of the Design Society by Julian Martinsson Bonde had participants build concepts with morphological matrices, some in specialised software and some by traditional means.
Spiridonov gives his own warning. His heating example is good in one respect and weak in many others. Engineers spent years decomposing heating, so the axes were handed over ready-made. With a truly original problem, you build the axes yourself. That takes real intellectual effort, he says, and it is "terribly useful" all the same.
There is a harder case. Spiridonov separates a task from a problem. In a task the goal is clear and the way there is not. In a problem you do not even know the goal. The box becomes a tool for problems only if you are willing to take a risk and decide what matters to you, what you cannot give up, what must hold. Those choices become the axes of the box. Zwicky never promised that, as far as Spiridonov knows. Add it, and you have what he jokingly calls Zwicky-2.
So the first move on a problem you can't even name is not to find the answer. It is to decide what you refuse to lose, and write it down as a row.
