As the newly-appointed Wellcome Foundation Lecturer in Management Science in the Department of General Practice, at the University of Liverpool Medical School, I was faced with a single problem: "What for the next three years of tenure in this job should I do?". The post was, and to this day remains, a unique one. There are no other lecturers in management science within a department of general practice in the British Isles. Indeed, the department itself is fairly unique, in that it contains not only clinical lecturers but, in addition to myself, lecturers in information science, medical ethics and sociology, as well as several other non-clinical researchers. Having an academic background in systems and especially Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), it seemed appropriate to choose a systemic approach to answer this most pressing question. After all, in this problem situation, to use Checkland's (1981) parlance, I could be designated both "problem solver" and "problem owner".