Is this why main stream science seems to have some of the difficulties it does?

Event oriented thinking sees the world as a complex succession of events rather than as a system as a whole. An event is behavior that happened or will happen. Event oriented thinking assumes that each event has a cause and that changing the cause will correspondingly change the event. The rest of the system that produced the event need not be considered.

whereas

Structural thinking sees the world as a complex structure composed of nodes, relationships, and interacting feedback loops. Once the structure is modeled, simulated and understood the fundamental behavior of the system becomes plainly obvious, making the system’s response to solution efforts predictable.

The central tenant of structural thinking is that the behavior of a complex system cannot be correctly understood without thoughtful construction of a model of the key structure of the system, and computer simulation of that model.

Ideas quoted from subsections of: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/