Confluence Policy & Strategy Group

10/13/2026

Today we’re publishing Issues Too Big for Session: The Case for Deliberate Decision-Making Infrastructure in State Government.

Some policy issues don’t fit inside a legislative session, not because the people working them aren’t capable, but because the subject is too technical, the affected parties too divided, or a rushed answer too costly to undo. This paper looks at how states have built other tools for exactly these moments, from extended timelines to standing commissions to processes that operate entirely outside government, including four states currently building governance structures for data center policy.

It closes with six questions any legislator, governor, or agency head can ask about the issue currently on their desk.

Read the full paper or the two-page summary:

Some issues do not fit inside a legislative session, and the reason has little to do with the legislators working on them. This paper draws on examples from across the country and closes with six questions any legislator, governor, or agency head can ask about the issue on their desk.

10/12/2026

Tomorrow we’re publishing a new paper: Issues Too Big for Session: The Case for Deliberate Decision-Making Infrastructure in State Government.

It’s about a pattern we keep seeing across our work with state leaders: some issues simply don’t fit inside a normal legislative session, and the reason has little to do with the people working them. When a subject is too technical, too contested, or too costly to get wrong, states need a different kind of tool.

Paper drops Tuesday, October 13 at www.confluencepsg.com

10/08/2026

“Stakehold” has become a verb, and I think that shift tells you something.

We hear it constantly: we stakeholded this, let’s go stakehold that. Real stakeholder engagement means people who actually know a subject sitting in a room long enough, and honestly enough, that you learn what they actually think.

What passes for it now is often a box to check: a few webinars, a handpicked invite list, a seventy-five-person Zoom call where everyone nods and moves on.

The tell is time. Real trust doesn’t happen in an hour. It happens over a process built to earn it.

New post:

Somewhere along the way, "stakeholder" stopped being a noun and became a verb. I hear it constantly now. We stakeholded this. Let's go stakehold that. And every time I hear it, I get a little more convinced that the word has drifted away from the thing it was supposed to protect.

10/05/2026

In 1978, Minnesota did something most states still haven’t tried. Instead of writing sentencing guidelines through the ordinary legislative process, the legislature built a permanent commission to do it, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, corrections officials, law enforcement, and public members, sitting on one body, indefinitely.

Nearly fifty years and a dozen changes in political control later, it’s still setting guidelines judges actually apply. By the early 1990s, fifteen other states had built something similar.

We think about Minnesota’s example constantly in our work, because most states are sitting on issues that would benefit from the same kind of deliberate infrastructure and haven’t built it yet. Not because the need isn’t there. Because nobody has named the pattern.

In 1978, the Minnesota legislature did something unusual. Facing wide disparities in how similar crimes were sentenced across the state, depending on the judge, the county, the year, lawmakers didn't write a fix themselves.

08/04/2026

Every state legislature is deciding AI policy this year. Most are doing it the way legislation normally gets made: a bill drafted by a small number of people, introduced, amended under public pressure, voted on within weeks.

Colorado tried that first. The state's 2024 AI law drew immediate pushback, and two legislative sessions, including a special session, failed to fix it.

In 2025, Colorado tried something different. A fourteen-member working group spent nine months getting the definitions right before a bill was written. The result passed the Senate 34–1 and the House 57–6, signed thirteen days after introduction.

We designed and facilitated that process. Our new white paper, Getting AI Regulation Right, sets out the mechanism in enough detail to be usable by a legislator, a governor's office, or an attorney general's office considering the same approach, and walks through eight domains where states are already deciding AI policy: consequential decisions, mental health and minors, frontier AI safety, public safety, data centers, workforce impact, government's own AI use, and synthetic media.

Read it here:

Most AI legislation gets written the way legislation normally gets made: a bill arrives already drafted, and every party’s first move is to defend or attack a position instead of understanding one. This paper makes the case for a different approach: get the people with real expertise in the room, ...

07/27/2026

We're thrilled to welcome Trace Faust as a Partner at Confluence PSG.

Trace brings a practice rooted in something that doesn't get named often enough in this work: a process is only as good as whether the people most affected by its outcome actually trust it.

Trace has spent the past decade in rooms where that trust was the variable. That has meant facilitating community dialogue and advising education leaders on some of education's highest-stakes decisions — school closures, bond oversight, board governance and accountability — across school districts statewide and beyond, including Colorado's two largest. It has meant designing and facilitating multi-year processes for child welfare and human services reform, rooms where the people with the most expertise are often the ones least accustomed to being included in the conversations. And it has meant deeply collaborative strategic planning work, with clients ranging from the Colorado Legislature to the statewide Community College system to local governments like the Town of Dillon, that produces something communities and organizations actually carry forward, not just sign off on.

We've always believed that a room produces better outcomes when the people in it are genuinely heard rather than technically consulted. Trace is the practitioner who makes that belief operational.

We've been building something deliberate here at Confluence PSG, and we're proud Trace is now part of that.

With decades in the rooms where the ordinary approaches had already run out, a disciplined, proven process design and community-centered practice, we’re ready for whatever you’re facing. If you have a room that needs to be held, not just managed, we would love to talk.

07/16/2026

State long-term care systems are under immense pressure. We are proud to support the Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) Work Group as this diverse group of stakeholders leans into the challenge to map a path forward.

The Colorado LTSS Work Group is a new statewide effort to examine Colorado's Long-Term Services and Supports system and develop recommendations for lasting change. It was established by the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition with funding from the Colorado Health Foundation. We've just launched our first two expert subcommittees — Workforce and Direct Care Capacity and Case Management and Care Coordination — and the LTSS Work Group is now accepting applications from people with relevant expertise or lived experience who want to serve.

If this is your work, or the work of someone you know, I'd encourage you to apply or share. Link to nominate someone to serve on a subcommittee in first comment.

The LTSS Work Group is a statewide coalition of stakeholders working to understand the system’s challenges and build recommendations for lasting change.

07/13/2026

34-1. 57-6. 31 recommendations codified in law. 58 recommendations across four simultaneous subcommittees. 50+ work groups and task forces.

Work across nearly every issue area and challenge.

Confluence PSG was built around a single conviction: that the most consequential problems facing government, communities, and institutions are not unsolvable. They are unresolved because the processes designed to address them have not been up to the task.

If you’ve ever wondered exactly what we do, who we work with and how we deliver results even where other efforts have fallen short, it’s all here. The portfolio, the methodology, and the outcomes. All in one place.

Confluence PSG was built around a single conviction: that the most consequential problems facing government, communities, and institutions are not unsolvable. They are unresolved because the processes designed to address them have not been up to the task.

07/07/2026

There is a moment in every high-stakes process when the room has to stop exploring and start deciding. Most facilitators rush toward it.

In three very different rooms over the past two years, that transition was the hinge on which everything turned: a regional transit governance redesign, a contested AI policy negotiation, and a civil rights study where the disagreements were not about data but about competing moral frameworks and lived experience.

What we learned about managing that moment, and why it applies far beyond task forces and working groups, is in our latest LinkedIn article.

By Berrick Abramson, President and Founder, Confluence PSG There is a moment in every high-stakes process when the room has to stop exploring and start deciding. Most facilitators rush toward it.

06/25/2026

Before most strategic planning retreats begin, the outcome is already half-determined. Each person walks in knowing what they want to leave with. The conversation that follows is less a planning process than a negotiation dressed up as one.

I recently did something different before a strategic planning retreat even started.

A growing suburb at the edge of a major metropolitan area had asked me to facilitate a City Council strategic planning session. Newer members alongside veterans. Long-standing issues alongside genuinely new ones: housing affordability, quality of life, a potential data center, transit-oriented development tied to a future rail corridor, a workforce development center being built with multiple partners. A room with real complexity and no visible crisis.

Before anyone sat down together, I sent each council member a survey. Not about policy priorities. About values and experience. What are the three most important things for you to achieve as a City Council Member? What did you learn about the community while running for office?

Those questions do something that an opening round-robin never does. They create a landscape of what people actually care about before the political performance starts. By the time the room came together, I already knew where the common ground was. So did they, once we made it visible.

The City Manager had asked me to come in specifically so he could participate rather than run the meeting. He understood what most leaders do not: that facilitating and thinking are incompatible jobs in the same room. He led a table exercise on systems thinking, and we took it outside. City council members physically moved together on the playground to demonstrate how systems interact, how a change in one place creates effects somewhere unexpected, how you cannot optimize one part without understanding the whole. It was not a team-building exercise. It was a way of making abstract thinking visible, and it set the tone for everything that followed.

When we came back inside, city staff noted that nothing raised during the session, including the boldest ideas, fell outside what was already being pursued or planned. The ambition in the room was grounded. That does not happen when people are lobbying for their issues. It happens when they have been asked to think before they have been asked to advocate.

The moment that stayed with me was the municipal airport. It had been a low-grade point of contention for years, present on every agenda, never generating real conversation or a consensus. That day it became something else entirely. Council members began talking about what it could be: a hub for professional learning, community events, general education, a gathering point that reflected the city's identity rather than its logistical needs. Nobody had unlocked that conversation before. The process had.

This is what I mean when I say we facilitate strategic planning rather than manage it. The outside consultant who has studied the three frameworks and run the SWOT exercise has never had to implement anything in a room like this one. They do not know where the political friction lives, which ideas will stall in the budget process, which partnerships are already strained, which staff members have been waiting for permission to say something. We do. Not because we read about it but because we work in these rooms, across government, nonprofits, and the private sector, from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs to the Division of Criminal Justice to cannabis trade associations to municipal governments navigating everything at once.

The plan that gets implemented is not the most comprehensive one. It is the one built by people who left the room with real ownership of what they agreed to.