We ran our first Featherline workshop this month — nine engineers from four plants, in a room in Bayan Lepas, for half a day. The format was deliberately unglamorous: no slides until someone in the room had described a real Monday morning out loud, in detail, including the parts that are embarrassing.
What we asked them to bring
- One recurring loss nobody has been able to pin down
- The report they actually open first thing in the morning
- The last root-cause investigation that took more than three days
- Whatever spreadsheet is quietly load-bearing on their line
The fourth one produced the most interesting hour of the day. Every plant had at least one spreadsheet that had become critical infrastructure without anyone deciding it should be — maintained by one person, backed up nowhere, and trusted more than the system it was extracted from.
What we got wrong
We had budgeted forty minutes for a walkthrough of the agent engine and it took eleven. People didn't want to see the reasoning trace; they wanted to know who gets paged when the agent is confident and wrong. We're restructuring the next session around approvals and accountability rather than capability.
