Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Rational behaviour
Now let’s assume that an organism not only has a memory that allows it to recognize patterns of
familiar situations and recall the corresponding pre-programmed reply, but also is able to
categorize the experience in a way that allows it to see the regularity or correlation between
situations which are similar in one aspect or another and the reactions that proved to be more or
less successful. This memory may also allow the organism to see the correlation between similar
situations and reactions that brought to negative results. In other words – an organism is able to
draw out certain regularities or ‘rules of nature’. Now it may apply these rules to new situations, not
exactly the same it faced before, but recognizable in terms of belonging to the category of familiar
situations, and may recognize certain actions, as the ‘categorized experience’ says, now
associated with certain chances to bring specific possible results. If more than one action is
possible, then some particular actions may look better than others. An organism faces the
necessity to make a choice, even two choices, because any choice is always twofold.
On the one hand – it is a choice of the one of possible (achievable) situations that belongs to the
zone of comfort (what to eat – cheese, or meat, or fish; what to do in order to shorten the time of
travel to the office – to buy a car, to change apartments; to have new officers who know English, or
to keep the old ones who would have learned English). These different ends within a zone of
comfort we call ‘potential goals’. Each one may be more or less desirable and related to bigger or
smaller benefit (utility) in addition to the unconditionally positive fact that all of them are situated in
the zone of comfort. But the most desirable potential goal is not necessary the one that should be
reached, because…
On the other hand, there are, most probably, many different ways to arrive to the same goals – to
get a car from different sellers, rent or buy these new apartments, find themselves or work with a
certain agency to find this new employee, etc. Thus, before any action can happen, the path (or
trajectory) should also be identified and evaluated.
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