Hi Berger,

Thanks for your message. I'll respond more fully later. Good to hear you
sail!

My feeling is sailing is a good example in favour of my comments:  race
training of successful helmsmen and boat teams  attempts to reduce
everything to single feedback loops or at most, two feedback loops.
Match-racing, one boat against another, is essentially a single feedback
loop system. Your boat makes a move, the other boat responds and you need to
change your move. One feedback loop. All the other factors are not part of
feedback loops or also single feedback loops - wind, tide, hydrodynamics
etc. You cannot change the tide, wind or hydrodynamic laws by your sailing
you can only respond to them. 
From my experience in regatta racing, helms typically reenvisage any
situation to two feedback loops or less.  In the main, this reduction back
towards a single loop thinking is done by learning whole sets of fixed
moves, patterns and  strategies that can be wheeled out in particular
situations (i.e. single feedback loop). There are large numbers of books and
training courses dedicated to learning these strategy groups (e.g. "Learn to
sail like Dennis Conner" - I'm showing my age!). This is similar to the way
those in the martial arts learn patterns and katas. Improving sail racing
skills is dedicated to reducing everything to seeing only one feedback loop
or less at any moment a decision needs to be made. You can easily test this
by listening to discourse when  sailing  decisions are made (e.g. 'Look they
are starting to lift, going about now'). The use of  'gut feeling' is not
about the solution. Otherwise any physiologically sensitive novice sailor
would be good. The use of 'gut feeling' is about which strategy to use in
seeing a particular pattern out on the water - simply a single feedback
loop.

There has been a lot of confusion about systems methods. There is no magic
in understanding them, the situation is very straightforward. The 'magic'
that has been used to  apparently differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft'
methods is a politically driven illusion. The same conceptual and empirical
situation applies to all. The systems field suffers in parts from much the
same sort of mess that the design field does. For example, one  problematic
systems belief is that systems analysis IS  designing. I wrote about this
problem some years ago in a mapping of the ways that systems analysis and
design activity fit together (confession - the title and spirit of the paper
was based on John Langrish' battleships paper at La Clusaz). You can find it
at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2003/systems%20&%20design.htm

What I'm more interested in is getting this right in terms of Design
Education about complex systems. Designers can learn to be able to design
better in the realm of multiple feedback loops. The question is how, and
which methods are likely to result in successful designed outcomes. In that
sense, I feel we are on the same side but seeing things from different
perspectives.

Warm regards,
Terry

Berger wrote:
"On a race cource of a regatta the action is a complex interdisciplinary
thing that involves aero and hydrodynamics, strategy, tactics and social
systems (teamwork) Some of these things can and are modelled in realtime
with computers, but in large we deal with chaotic systems (weather)
nonlinear tubulences over foil surfaces and social dynamics. It makes you
wonder why the best guys always are at the right spot at the right moment ,
how they catch the shifts etc... If you ask them they dont answer. Its the
gut feeling, years of experience. its the deep knowledge and skill of being
a specialist in coping with multi-layered systems in real time. Soft systems
approaches are fokused on these issues and therefor have renewed the way we
think of and cope with systems. So this way of approaching systems askes for
different skills than mentioned in the paper (thanks for the reference!) It
would only make partly sense to approach this with the old school systems
view: isolating the systems and their subsystems and look at all the
feedback loops and relations separately etc. And we have not even talked
about the technologies and economies of sailing (wich can hurt badly :) )"