rationalist technologies

Rational technologies (March, 2007) --
There are the well-established rational technologies in common use such as budgeting, planning, TQM, strategic analysis, and management techniques in general. Rational technologies involve three components:

• abstractions -- models of situations that identify sets of variables, their causal structures, and sets of action alternatives
• collections of data -- capturing histories of the organization and the world in which it acts
• decision rules -- that consider alternatives in terms of their expected consequences and select the alternative that has the best expected consequences from the point of view of the organization's values, desires, and time perspectives.

This technology serves very well as an instrument of exploitation, especially in simple environments, but can be ineffective, even dangerous, applied to exploration or complex problems.