We think it might. Encounter is a cross-domain research & design practice working on dissipative systems: cells, populations, organisations, change programs, the cycles we live inside. We try to find the right intervention when one of them has stalled.
Most of our current evidence is in biology, where the measurements are sharp. The framework reaches further.
What we found
How do cells decide to live, divide, kill, or surrender?
What does it take for a population to renew itself under pressure — and what fails first when it can't?
What is the shape of the menstrual cycle, and why does menopause happen the way it does?
Why do some organizations renew themselves, and others quietly collapse from the inside?
Most change efforts fail to complete. What does it take for a change to land — and what stage does it usually fail at?
What shape does a technology run as, and what does it do to ours?
Biology decides without anyone deciding. The same architecture — a capacitor loading to threshold, a factory building, a reactor meeting, a homeostat conserving — appears in a T cell, a falling leaf, a fly laying an egg. Read the cycle, and what the clinician is doing changes.
The Chen–Mellman cancer-immunity cycle has organised tumour immunology for thirteen years. Alongside its successes, clinical observations have accumulated that the cycle as drawn cannot resolve: PD-L1 predicts at AUC 0.63, response rates vary from 70% to 2% across cancer types with the same drug, cold tumours stay cold for reasons the cycle cannot name. This paper proposes that the seven Mellman steps are a true description of six of sixteen positions, and that the missing ten are where the unanswered questions live. Across 33 cancer types, only 4 stall at the synapse where anti-PD-1 acts.
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