The decade of observation that built Slot v. Flow™

Some frameworks arrive as ideas. This one arrived as a pattern — noticed once, then again, then so consistently that ignoring it stopped being an option.

For the better part of a decade, I worked as a diplomatic interpreter. My job was to be invisible: present in some of the most sensitive British-LatAm professional settings imaginable, trusted with the words, and expected to stay out of the way of everything else. Which meant I had an unusual vantage point. I was in the room, but I was not of the room. And from that position, I watched what actually happened when British and LatAm professionals tried to work together. Not what the agenda said, not what the minutes recorded, but what passed between people, and what did not.

What I kept seeing was not a language problem. The language was usually fine. It was everything around the language that was quietly deciding outcomes.

Building the blueprint

A few years into my diplomatic work, I started doing what I always do when something does not have a name: I began systematising it. I noted how diplomatic interpreting differed from conference interpreting — not in technique, but in role, in context, in the specific skills the setting demanded and the ones it made irrelevant. I observed how my clients prepared, how they read rooms, where they lost the thread and where they held it.

Eventually, I had enough to say something coherent. In 2019 I presented my initial conclusions at the ITI Conference in Sheffield. The response confirmed what I suspected: these patterns were real, they were consistent, and they had not been formally articulated before. I had not imagined them.

That work became Welcome — a practical reference on diplomatic interpreting as it is actually practised in the 21st century, within what I called the new paradigm of network diplomacy. The argument at its core was that diplomatic interpreting deserved to be recognised as a distinct field, with its own body of knowledge, its own preparation logic, and its own professional standards. Not a subset of conference interpreting. Its own thing.

Before Welcome, there was Jump — a guide to building a sustainable, independently-owned practice as a linguist. That book came from a different kind of observation: that most interpreters were running their professional lives on other people's terms, without a framework for making deliberate decisions about the work they took, the clients they served, or the direction they were building toward.

Two books, two fields, one underlying instinct: name what is happening so you can work with it deliberately instead of reacting to it blindly.

What the room was actually teaching me

Here is the thing I could not have written in either of those books, because I had not yet fully understood it myself.

The decade I spent in diplomatic rooms was not just research into interpreting. It was a decade-long study of British-LatAm professional interaction at close range — in trade negotiations, bilateral meetings, state visits, networking receptions, and formal presentations. I was present for the friction and for the flow. I saw which interactions built something and which ones wasted everyone's time while appearing productive. I saw where trust compounded and where it quietly eroded.

And what I saw, consistently, was that the professionals who navigated these settings most effectively were not always the most fluent, the most senior, or the best prepared in the conventional sense. They were the ones who understood — consciously or instinctively — that British and LatAm professional cultures operate on different underlying systems. That what counts as directness, warmth, structure, and respect is not universal. That the part of communication that is non-verbal is not decoration around the words; it is doing most of the work.

That insight is what became Slot v. Flow™.

The frameworks change. The observation that made them necessary has not. If you are working across the British-LatAm space and finding that things that should work are not quite working, it is probably not a language problem. It almost never is.