Cognitive friction is not a personal failure. It is information about fit, load, and design.
You can name what is hard. You still do not know what actually helps.
You suddenly have names for things you have done your whole life — and still no better way to handle a single one of them.
You manage everything, and nobody sees what managing it takes.
Types stay fixed. Friction moves.
MBTI, DISC and Structogram describe stable traits. SNIP™ describes current load — and load is the thing that actually changes what you can reach. The same person hits a wall on Tuesday and walks through it on Thursday, and the difference is rarely effort.
Which is why everything in here has two sides: a signal you notice from the inside, and a design response someone can act on from the outside. A score you can do nothing with is a label. A score that points to a specific adjustment is a tool.
Three instruments, one architecture
The Friction Finder asks twenty questions across five domains and gives you a profile — a shape, a friction level per domain, and concrete design responses for whichever domains came out heavy. Fifteen minutes. This is where you start.
The Navigator holds seventy entries, one per friction area. Each one opens into what it feels like from the inside, what is actually happening, four things to try, and a three-step practice. There is a quick check-in at the top if you do not know where to begin, plus filters and search for when you do.
The Signal Box reads what mode you are in today. Ten faders, two per system, moving independently — because in a real nervous system they do. The interesting reading is not which pole is higher; it is what happens when both are. Wanting novelty and wanting predictability in the same hour is not a contradiction in you. It is a system pulling in two directions, and it costs more than either pole alone.
Together they answer three different questions: what your system is, what it is doing right now, and what to change.
Then it comes off the screen
The print pack gives you blank spider charts and score tables for all five domains, plus a print guide. Score on paper, plot by hand, keep the sheet.
The Implementation Workbook turns the profile into one change that holds — eleven exercises along State → Access → Skill, a four-week review, and three tracks: on your own, a 60-minute session, or a 90-minute team workshop.
The Manual explains the whole model: the five domains and the brain networks under them, the 1–10 spectrum, the four chart patterns that come up again and again, and how to get from a score to something different on Monday.
Four sittings, about two hours
Deliberately split. Seventy areas in one evening is how the last twenty get scored at random.
One. Read the manual and look at the wheel. Score nothing yet. ~15 min
Two. Run the Friction Finder and read your profile. ~15 min
Three. Go deeper on your two heaviest domains — the questionnaire on paper, or the Navigator on screen. ~45 min
Four. Pick one condition to change and set a date to look again. ~20 min
What you end up with
Five charts. A shape you can read. Two or three named friction areas instead of a long list. Five design responses for each. One condition you are changing, and a date to check.
What you will not get is a type, a label or a diagnosis. That is deliberate, and it is the point.
One promise: give it your time and your honesty, and you will leave with a picture of your own system that you can hand to another person and be understood.
Less than a single coaching session
One session gives you sixty minutes and a conversation you half remember. This gives you a profile you can re-score in three months, tools you keep, and something to bring into a session so the hour is spent on the work instead of on getting oriented.
In their words
"The biggest relief was realizing I don't have to solve every difficulty by pushing myself harder." Some things need a different strategy from me, and some things genuinely need a different setup around me. I'm much clearer now about what to change and what to ask for. — Serena M. · HR Business Partner
How it runs
In your browser, on a laptop or desktop. Nothing to install. Nothing is uploaded — your answers stay on your own machine, and you can export or print anything you want to keep.
There is no login to maintain and no subscription. You get an access code and a permanent page — alexandrarobuste.com/snip-tool — that you can come back to whenever the picture changes.
Using it with someone else
The Friction Finder has a mode for that: it rewrites every question for someone you lead or support, so you are not answering about them in language written for you.
Four rules hold everywhere. The profile belongs to the person who filled it in. Never collect profiles across a team — assess the conditions instead. Do not score someone else, because a profile you fill in about another person is an opinion with a number attached. And stay in scope: if what surfaces is trauma, crisis or a health question, that is a referral, not a coaching topic.
What it is not
Not a test. Not a diagnosis. Not a personality type. Not a course — there are no videos and no lessons, and nothing expires.
It has no norms, no cut-offs and no validation study behind it. A high score is not evidence of a condition and a low score is not evidence against one.
Physical causes produce the same picture — thyroid function, iron, sleep apnea, medication, pain and hormonal change all show up as cognitive friction. A blood test rules out more than a chart can.
Licence
Licensed for personal use — your own profile, your own thinking. Professional and commercial use requires a licence: practitioners using it with clients, studios and teams, and training contexts.
Built by Alexandra Robuste, author of Gentle Leading & Neurodivergence (Routledge). The reasoning behind the protocol is set out in "Systemic NeuroCognitive Indexing Protocol (SNIP): Toward a Holistic, Label-Free Understanding of Cognition."
