The theme of this conference is the future direction and prospects for systems research. Predicting the future for any form of complex phenomena is very difficult and it is not the intention of this paper to do so for Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). However, the difficulty of predicting future directions does not mean that any attempt to guide or manage the future can be abandoned. The challenge is to "manage" research rather than envisage it as a totally random process. This paper therefore explores some thinking about managing the future direction of SSM.