I built the Slot System™ first. The harder question was what shape the other side would take.

I kept coming back to something small: the difference between my Oyster card in London and my SUBE card back when I lived in Buenos Aires.

Back then, topping up a SUBE was never a sure thing. You never knew which machine would work, or where. So, I'd take a longer route to the train station, one with a few extra stops, just to give myself more chances to top up before I needed to travel. Relying on the machine at the station alone meant risking missing a train I couldn't pay for.

That's a good example of Latin American creativity, of lateral thinking under a system that doesn't always cooperate. But it only showed me one piece: the overlapping part. Back then, all I could picture looked more like a flow chart than a loop. I didn't have the whole picture. Not yet.

So I sat with it. I'd learned by then that a system like this reveals itself in its own time, the way JK Rowling has described her characters arriving to her rather than the other way round. You can't force it. You just keep showing up and let it land when it's ready.

Mine landed in a meeting between a Salvadoran delegation and an advisory team at the UK Treasury.

I was interpreting. The Salvadorans kept giving long introductions before they got anywhere near the point. The Brits waited, politely, and increasingly impatiently. If you've read my piece on how interpreting works, you'll know what I mean when I say even I was getting a little exasperated, carrying whole paragraphs before anyone reached the marzipan.

Then it hit me. Every time the Salvadorans wanted to say something, they spent that time bringing the Brits into the loop first.

Loops. Loops.

I remember taking the bus home after that meeting. I do my best thinking on a walk or looking out of a moving vehicle window, and somewhere on that ride it clicked: Latin Americans don't operate in flow charts. They operate in loops.

I went looking for loops after that, and I found them everywhere. Delegates breaking into momentary sidebars mid-meeting, one loop opening while another stayed open, then closing it and picking the first one back up an hour later. The same project held under two or three hypotheses at once, nobody rushing to settle on one. Even in the corridor: Latin Americans walking in loose, constantly moving circles, where the Brits kept to a single file.

I knew I had it. But I was still missing one part: if the Brits move through a low-context sequence of high-context slots, then how do high-context loops connect to each other?

I figured it out while playing with a string. LatAm high-context loops run concurrently in a constant, high-context flow – one that takes exactly as much work to navigate as any single loop inside it.

The Loop System™ is a system for understanding how Latin American culture organises social and professional interactions. Latin American culture doesn't move slot to slot. It moves loop to loop: overlapping situational frames that open, close, split, and reopen, often overlapping and running several at once. There's no clean edge between one loop and the next, the way there is between UK slots. One loop just folds into another.

What trips people up, if they're expecting British sequence, is that the loops don't hand off to each other. They run at the same time, in the same high-context register, and staying inside more than one takes real effort. A meeting is rarely just the meeting. It's also whatever sidebar opened inside it, and whatever gets picked back up over dinner that night.

The Salvadorans in my meeting hadn't lost the thread. They were bringing their counterparts into a loop before saying anything that mattered inside it. Once I understood that, I started finding the pattern everywhere I looked.

I spent years building that understanding into something usable: a practical system for British-LatAm executives and diplomats losing impact to friction they can't see. The Loop System™ maps how Latin American loops open, how they link to each other, and what the rules look like once you're inside the flow.

It came from the gym, from a book club, from public transport in two of the busiest cities in the world, and from two decades interpreting Latin Americans: a decade for Latin Americans in the US first, then a decade of Latin American delegations in the UK.

It's the other half of Slots v. Loops™: The Systems for British-LatAm Executives and Diplomats, out now.

If any of this sounds familiar, the book was written for you. I'm glad it's all in there now, the book and the Field Kit both.