I started listening to UC Berkeley podcast CS 162 Operating Systems and Systems Programming with John Kubiatowicz as it star performer, and was immediately rewarded with phrases like "taming complexity" and "scalable madness". He is absolutely right - programming billions of transistors, living and breathing electrons at astronomical speeds, is a huge control challenge. Operating system presents a software engineer with a "virtual machine" that is orders of magnitude simpler, and therefore much easier to deal with.
In a similar fashion we give students, inventors, and innovators a five-element system model, i.e. a technology-independent virtual machine, that they can play with without knowing all the gory details about mechanics, psychology, or biology of the underlying elements. Like a child, who accepts the magical nature of things around her, a person working with a model frees her mind to focus on her creative transformation impulse.

Should use it as an example in the five element analysis chapter