Over the last 18 years I have learned a lot about life through the experience of watching someone very close to me fight melanoma. It has been a roller coaster ride of highs and lows, temporary victories and challenging setbacks. Luckily this person’s melanoma has been described as “lazy” or “stupid” because despite all this time it has yet to fully attack the way most melanoma’s do. Just as important, I believe, is the fact that this individual is incredibly optimistic and has taken on this fight with passion and a “can do” attitude from day one.

Over time the melanoma has become a nagging issue for all of us in relationship with it that never really goes away. The cancer just kind of lingers there literally just below the surface of the skin and continues to remind all of us that it exists by popping back up in the form of a nodule just when we start to forget about it. It is funny how similar this is to business, just when things seem to get rolling something or someone comes along to disrupt the flow.

The more traditional medical response to the cancer’s reappearances has led to 11 and counting, different day surgeries to remove nodules of various sizes and depths. There has been a chemotherapy infusion isolated only on the leg where the melanoma exists. They also removed the lymph nodes as a preventative measure that led to lymphedema. All of these aggressive procedures have helped to keep the cancer at bay but appear to be reactive responses to when the cancer surfaces. I liken these medical responses to the traditional business reactions of changing the team, hiring the best expert consultant money can buy or scraping the business line when there is an issue that arises.  

The other piece of the ongoing treatment that has proven to be more effective at times has been the use of Immunotherapy, which is defined as “treatment of disease by inducing, enhancing, or suppressing an immune response”. There are two kinds of immunotherapies; activation is designed to elicit or amplify an immune response and suppression is designed to reduce or more appropriately direct an existing immune response. The earlier attempts in this case used Interferon and Interleukin in order to allow communication between cells to trigger the protective defenses of the immune system that eradicate pathogens or tumors. The side effects of these treatments were challenging at times but the results promising in terms of lengthening the time between nodules appearing.  

The latest round of treatment is a trial that combines Bevacizumab, a FDA approved drug for breast and lung cancer, with Ipilimumab, which is in final stage FDA approval for a variety of cancers including melanoma. Both are antibody’s that are naturally produced by the body’s immune system. In laymen’s terms, the Bevacizumab is designed to inhibit the growth of blood vessels that bring nutrients to the tumor cells. The Ipilimumab is designed to inhibit the molecule that is responsible for shutting down the immune system. The result is that the immune system, which is responsible for defending the body against potentially harmful particles not typically found in your body, is allowed to continue doing what it does best.  The result is a one-two punch that weakens the cancer cells by depleting the blood flow to them and then frees up the immune system by damping the turn off to hopefully destroy the cancer cells.   

Are you still with me? So why does immunotherapy make sense to me you are asking? As someone who sees the world through a systems theory lens, this trial and immunotherapy is exciting and makes sense because it is leveraging systemic thinking. The general belief in systems theory is that the answer lies within the system. It is just a matter of finding the answer and sometimes that requires outside help. Immunotherapy is clearly doing the same thing. It is taking what the body does naturally and trying to do more of it for better results. Sure there are going to be side effects of this change that gets introduced. There always are side effects when change occurs. The ultimate question will be; were the short-term pain and inconvenient side effects worth it in the long run. In the case of the patient, the early results are promising and the trial continues on.

I share this story not only to honor the courage and perseverance of the patient in this journey, but also in the hope that more people will consider this approach to problem solving. I am in business to help organizations solve revenue challenges and people look to me for answers. The easy answer in expert consulting are the surgical solutions of cutting something out, layering training on like chemotherapy or completely redoing an entire sales process or product offering. I believe the answer lies in the harder solution of process consulting to identify the right existing behaviors in the organization to activate and suppress in order to restore systemic health and ultimately drive consistent revenue results. That is why immunotherapy makes sense to me. What about you?