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Wicked problems are open-ended, highly interdependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. This confounds conventional approaches to government because policies and budgets tend to be aligned within these boundaries and not across them, making it difficult to bring the appropriate talent, knowledge and assets into an interagency approach to tackle whatever wicked problem is at hand. In response, there has been advocacy for a 'whole-of-government' approach, which employs various methods to achieve either centralized control (e.g., the appointment of 'Czars') or partnership working (e.g., high-level committees or multi-agency task forces). However, these vehicles can be ad hoc and insufficiently systemic in the face of the extreme complexity of wicked problems, where interdependencies abound and the purposes, perspectives and values of the government agencies and other stakeholders can often be in conflict, and therefore become part of the problem. The research described in this paper was conducted to develop and evaluate a new Systemic Intervention approach to designing interagency meta-organizations. The proposed way forward is a multi-method approach that combines the Viable System Model (as the organizational design instrument) with Systemic Perspective Mapping (a new participatory problem structuring method) and boundary critique. This approach was trialed on the wicked problem of international organized crime and its interface with local gangs in Chicago. Our research indicates that this new approach offers significant promise for the future management of wicked problems. Copyright © (2017) by International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS)All rights reserved.