Hi Slap,

I suspect one of the problems is that when many people think of systems they use mechanical analogies. Systems theory, at least in its original form, was based on biological, not mechanical, analogies. At the same time, the original formulations of it (forget F.W. Taylor, he's a twit who doesn't count) implicitly include some form of evolutionary theory (through time) as well as process theory (at a spot in time). Shifting to a mechanistic analog, for which Taylor deserves to be reincarnated as a dung beetle, destroys the change over time component (evolution) and devalues the usefulness of the model to a large degree.