SSSS · Stage 2
A twelve-week Sandbox Season for organizations ready to adopt AI without losing what they are for.
A small cohort of your staff — five or six people — takes your real work, runs three cycles of structured experiments, and assembles a validated portfolio of AI use cases the senior team is willing to stand behind.
What you walk away with
Three artifacts, one trained team, honestly scored.
A validated use-case portfolio
Five to ten use cases, scored across four dimensions, flagged for authorship, voice, trust, and formation, owned by named staff.
A board-ready governance one-pager
Drafted mid-season, reviewed by your Safety Owner, signed by the senior sponsor. Ready for the next board agenda.
A trained internal cohort
Five to six staff with formed pattern recognition, working experiment discipline, and the judgment to run the next season without us.
The twelve-week shape
Five phases. Spaced practice. One shared document.
Weekly ninety-minute working sessions with roughly three hours of async work between them. Short loops on purpose. Spacing is what lets the eye develop between cycles.
Week 1 · Orient
Season charter and roles
Senior Sponsor, Portfolio Owner, Safety Owner, and experiment team named. Out-of-scope territory written down and defended for twelve weeks.Weeks 2–3 · Discover
The eight-pattern scan, then the filter
Your real work scanned through the canonical value patterns. Twelve to thirty candidate use cases narrowed to three or four experiment briefs.Weeks 4–7 · Test
Three cycles of structured experiments
Five required fields per experiment: input, output, time comparison, quality judgment, risk flag. Paired peer review, not self-scoring.Weeks 8–10 · Judge
The ethical and relational flag
Your Safety Owner asks the question the scoring cannot: what about this might cost us something humanly? Reroutes and parks happen here, not later.Weeks 11–12 · Assemble
Portfolio and handoff
The validated portfolio takes shape. Two board-ready one-pagers. Portfolio ownership transfers to the internal Portfolio Owner. Season closes.
The cohort
Seven named roles, five or six people.
Below four, you do not get enough experiments. Above seven, the shared document loses signal and the weekly session stops being a working meeting. Five or six participants carry seven accountability threads so the flag, the portfolio, and the experiments never collapse into one overloaded seat.
Senior Sponsor
Weeks 1, 6, 12CEO or executive director. Signs the charter, defends the portfolio to the board, and holds the room when hard decisions need to be made.
Portfolio Owner
All twelve weeksThe senior leader who will own the portfolio after handoff. Primary contact throughout. Usually a chief-of-staff or strategic operations role.
Safety Owner
Flag weeks (8, 10)The senior leader who already carries governance or ethics accountability. Writes the ethical and relational flag paragraphs. Non-negotiable role.
Experiment operators (three seats)
All twelve weeksStaff from two or three departments. Mixed seniority. Three accountable seats on the experiment work, shared document hygiene, and named candidates. One seat may rotate mid-season when the charter names it.
Observer-veto
As neededA senior leader with standing to say no. Stops any candidate drifting toward protected territory: formation load, pastoral care, vulnerable populations, or data classes Safety has ruled out.
What is out of scope
Scope discipline is the product.
A proposal without an out-of-scope list fails. It is the list that keeps a season’s integrity intact. We name it before we begin, defend it through the twelve weeks, and only expand with explicit written authorization.
- Tool procurement — you select and pay for any AI assistants used during the season.
- Implementation engineering into production systems.
- Any use case touching minors, vulnerable populations, or trauma-adjacent programs in season one.
- Any pastoral care, discipleship, or formation writing that bears the organization's theological weight.
- Deployments into live donor-facing or member-facing workflows.
- Board presentations, donor meetings, or external communications about the season.
- Cross-departmental work beyond the designated cohort.
- Ongoing facilitation past Week 12.
Pricing
Fixed fee, milestone-weighted, published zones.
Not hourly. Not a retainer. Not outcome-based. A fixed fee scoped to your organization’s size, paid in installments against milestones. Milestones reward completion; monthly payments reward drag. Enterprise and multi-cohort scopes are custom; the full table lives on the pricing page.
- Revenue band
- Under $2M annual revenue
- Scope
- Single department, four participants
- Payment
- 50% kickoff · 50% Week 12
- Revenue band
- $2M–$10M annual revenue
- Scope
- Multi-department, five to six participants
- Payment
- $10K kickoff · $11K Week 6 · $11K Week 12
- Revenue band
- $10M–$50M annual revenue
- Scope
- Org-wide, six to eight participants plus observers
- Payment
- $18K kickoff · $18K Week 6 · $19K Week 12
Methodology
The argument is published.
Every session, every template, every flag paragraph traces back to a published canon piece. The nine-article sandbox canon is readable in about three hours end-to-end. Read it before you sign anything — it is the most accurate preview of the season we can offer.
Composite case
See a season without a real client in the room
The exemplar is fiction on purpose: same cadence and artifacts as a real season, invented particulars so nothing leaks from any engagement file.
The smaller group that does not choose either equal error.
Most organizations will choose fearful avoidance or reckless adoption. You are being invited into the smaller group that does neither.