Something to hold in your hands
Nine days.
On 28 May, Slot v. Flow™: The Systems for British-LatAm Professionals goes on sale. I’ve been sitting on this thing for years. Now it’s a physical object you can hold, and that still doesn’t quite feel real.
Before it ships, here’s what’s inside.
What's in the book
Two systems. The Slot System™ maps how British culture organises professional interaction. The Flow System™ maps the Latin American side. Together, they give you a working model of how each culture reads a room, builds trust, and communicates, and why those readings collide without either party noticing.
Each chapter opens with a scene you’ll recognise. A warm first meeting that led nowhere. A proposal sent promptly and met with silence. A comment that didn’t land as expected. A relationship that felt established on one side and still forming on the other. Then the book names what happened and gives you one clear move for the next time you’re in that situation.
It's an evidence-based, theory-backed framework for professional use. Specific enough to be useful the day you finish it.
Why it exists
I spent the last decade interpreting for British and Latin American professionals in diplomatic briefings, executive negotiations, and technical workshops in the rooms where language was never the problem.
Every professional I worked with was an expert in their own field, well-prepared, and completely certain they were reading the situation and their counterparts correctly.
Most of them weren’t.
The friction is invisible to the untrained eye: all you see a difficult counterpart, a warm contact who went cold, a deal that slowed for no obvious reason, a message that’s not getting across as intended. Slot v. FlowÔ names what’s actually happening and applies intercultural intelligence to it.
The idea started in a Wimbledon book club in 2015 right after I moved to London from Buenos Aires. I kept feeling baffled by the book meeting ‘hard stop’. Every meeting ended the same way: the group vanished in under two minutes, no drawn-out goodbyes on the pavement, no cluster of people still arguing about the last chapter on the way to the tube. Just gone. For a long time, I thought I’d said something wrong, that somehow, I had unknowingly put my foot in it. Then I realised I hadn’t misread a person. I’d misread the system.
Those systems are what the book maps.
Your copy
Available in paperback and ebook. Ships 28 May 2026.
If you’ve been reading The Friction Dispatch since Issue 1, you already know the two systems. The book is where they live in full, with the research, the case studies, and the practical moves for every stage of a British-LatAm professional relationship.
Until next Tuesday,
Cecilia
Founder, Multilateral Studio · Author, Slot v. Flow™
