Water resources conflicts are often implicit due to distance between stakeholders and the distributed nature of decision making. Physical distance and time separate downstream effects from upstream human activity. In addition, farmers and other interest groups manage upstream lands with different strategies. System state requirements of complex water systems, driven by purposeful activity, are difficult to define in advance and variable over time. Stakeholders constantly learn to adopt to a changing environment. Soft systems analysis, emphasizing learning inhuman related systems, provided a framework to analyze stakeholders and define design criteria for a group decision support system for land use optimization.