The Touchstone Workshop

What it is

Sequoyah, our namesake, was a silversmith. A touchstone is the small dark stone a silversmith uses to test the purity of gold and silver: you draw the metal across it and read what it is really made of before you commit it to the work. That is what this workshop is for. Before you spend real budget building, we test the idea with you and find out what it is actually made of, where the value really lives, and what it will take.

Most consulting workshops start in the conference room. Ours ends there. Before anyone books travel, we interview the people who actually run the process: the operators, the quality leads, the IT owners. Then we write up what we heard and send it to you with one request: tell us where we got it wrong. By the time we walk into the room, we are not guessing about your business.

The workshop itself is a facilitated working session. We present our understanding of your problem and a proposed approach, then we work it together: where the risks live, how to mitigate them, what depends on what, and what should happen first. If your team has already experimented, a homegrown prototype, a spreadsheet of results, a process document, we build on that work instead of pretending it does not exist.

What you will not get is a backlog dump or a proposal disguised as findings. You leave with an architecture, a short list of named epics, a suggested sequence, and an honest accounting of the risks, including the work we think your team should own instead of paying us for it.

Format

Step one is a scoping conversation: a short call to align on the problem, identify the stakeholders who own it, and gather what already exists. No charge to figure out whether a workshop fits.

Step two is discovery: we interview the people closest to the process, typically operations, quality, and IT leadership, then write the discovery summary and send it to you to correct, challenge, and extend.

Step three is the workshop day: an on-site working session with your stakeholders and our engineers. We present findings, validate assumptions together, work the risks and mitigations, and walk through the proposed architecture and epics as a group.

Step four is the deliverable: the architecture, the epics overview, the sequence, and the measurement plan, in your hands. The next step is your call: build with us, build internally, or wait until the timing is right.

Who it is for

Leaders who own an ambitious initiative, often AI, and need to know what they are building before they pay to build it. The room works best with the people closest to the problem: the executive sponsor, operations and quality leadership, and whoever owns the systems the solution must live alongside.