While the Strategic Dependency (SD) model maintains a level of abstraction by modelling only the external relationships among actors, the SR model forgoes that abstraction in order to allow a deeper understanding about strategic actors' reasoning about processes to be explicitly expressed.

The SR model describes the intentional relationships that are "internal" to actors, such as means-ends relationships that relate process elements, providing explicit representation of "why" and "how" and alternatives.

The rationales are at strategic level, so that the process alternatives being reasoned about are strategic relationships, i.e., SD configurations.

Using knowledge represented in and organized by these modelling concepts, process alternatives can be systematically generated and explored, so as to help actors find new process designs that better address their interests, needs, and concerns. (p31)

The SR model is a graph, with serveral types of nodes and links that work together to provide a representational stucture for expressing the rationale behind processes.(p31)