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.
It exists because AI has compressed the timeline. Projects used to leave months for a team to learn your business and for trust to build along the way. That time is gone, so we do the learning up front, before a single line of code is written.
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, over about three weeks. You name the four to seven people closest to the process, typically operations, quality, and IT leadership. We research your company, your industry, and its standards, then interview each of them. AI helps us transcribe and correlate what we hear, and our product owners and architects review every piece of it. We write the discovery summary and send it to you to correct, challenge, and extend.
Step three is the workshop day: a six-hour, on-site working session with your stakeholders and our engineers. We present the requirements, the architecture, and the expected return on investment, validate assumptions together, work the risks and mitigations in the room, and walk through the proposed epics as a group.
Step four is the deliverable: the architecture, the epics overview, the sequence, and the measurement plan, in your hands. It stands on its own as the baseline for what comes next, and the next step is your call: build with us, build internally, bring in another provider, 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.
We have run discovery since 1999 across banking and financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, and manufacturing, most often where complex systems have to work together.
The reaction we hear most is surprise at how quickly we understand the operation. One participant put it plainly: "I did not think anyone could understand what we do that fast."
What you leave with
A written discovery summary, reviewed and corrected by your own team before workshop day
An architecture diagram in plain terms, with the integration boundary drawn
Named epics with dependencies and a suggested sequence
The requirements and an expected return on investment, presented and challenged in the room
A measurement plan: what gets automated on day one, what stays human-in-the-loop
A risk list worked in the room, with mitigations attached
A "what this needs from you" list, including work your team should own
A Touchstone document that stands on its own, usable as the baseline with us or any other provider
What a real workshop looks like
Request this workshop
Tell us about your team and we will follow up with dates and what to expect.