I spent two evenings developing the materials. I built the workshop around a central framework I’ve been developing for three years: what I call the friction map, which is a visual representation of where a process creates resistance versus where it flows. It’s not proprietary — the underlying concepts are standard process improvement thinking — but the specific way I present it, the way I guide a group through building one together, is something I have refined substantially through practice.
I know what I am doing in a training room. I have done this enough times that the preparation is less about figuring out what to say and more about calibrating the right level and pace for this specific group. Northbridge’s team was relatively experienced and had operational awareness of their own problems; they did not need basics explained. They needed a structured way to look at things they had been living inside of.
I built that structure. I went to sleep early the night before the workshop. I woke up and I was calm.
That calmness is a thing I have learned to trust. When I am not calm before a session, it is usually because the preparation was insufficient. When I am calm, it usually means I have done the work.
I had done the work.
## What Daniel Saw
I have thought about what the morning was like for Daniel, because I think it matters and because he has told me some of it.
He drove to work knowing I would be there. He had known for three weeks, since our kitchen conversation, and in those three weeks he had thought about it a great deal. He told me this during one of our later conversations, not with the self-pity that could have accompanied it but with a factual quality that suggested he had genuinely processed rather than just stewed.