Confluence Policy & Strategy Group

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.

06/17/2026

In November 2018, just over a year after Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, we held a Workforce Summit that brought together the Governor's Office, every state agency, and dozens of employers from local businesses to Marriott, Microsoft, and World Central Kitchen to create real career pathways for Puerto Rico's students.

More than 1,400 students were matched with employers for work-based learning in the first year. More than 800 were guaranteed a living wage job upon completion. The Clinton Global Initiative recognized the effort with an Ideas Into Action award in 2019.

Last year, one of those students wrote to tell me she's now a manager, mentoring her own interns. That note is pinned above my desk.

The full story and what it means for how we approach every engagement since is on the blog.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico within two weeks of each other. By the time I arrived on the island, the damage was not just physical. Students were returning to schools that in many cases could not reopen, in communities whose economic futures looked nothing like they had twe...

06/15/2026

There is a reason fire extinguishers say "break glass in case of emergency." You do not reach for one for an everyday problem. You reach for it when the normal options are exhausted and the situation cannot wait.

Colorado passed an AI law that almost nobody at the table actually wanted. Two further efforts, including a special session, tried to rewrite it and could not build agreement among the stakeholders who would have to live with it. The next attempt ran through a structured process. Every party in the room, consumer advocates, civil rights organizations, technology companies, business associations, ended up supporting the result. It passed the Senate 34-1, the House 57-6, and was signed into law thirteen days after introduction.

This is exactly what Confluence was built to do. Not just for the moment when everything is on fire, but for the room that has time, no crisis forcing anyone's hand, and a problem too complex for the people already at the table to untangle on their own.

The Colorado Educator Safety Task Force is the second kind of room. Nothing forced that work onto anyone's desk on a particular day. It met monthly for nearly a year. What changed the outcome was not urgency. It was a neutral facilitator with no stake in the answer, and a process built to bring in more than the usual insiders. More than 1,100 educators were surveyed. More than half reported being physically injured by a student, a finding that contradicted every existing data set. People said the true thing because the process made it safe to.

The Working Group on Transforming Criminal and Juvenile Justice is a third kind. A twenty-year-old commission had sunset with no agreement on what should follow. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement, and reform advocates, people who had spent decades with fundamentally different visions for the system, reached consensus on the mission, structure, and membership for two new permanent bodies. Historic adversaries, at the same table, agreeing on what comes next. That is what the process is built to produce.

And then there is Puerto Rico. Later this week I'll share the story of a school system rebuilt after two hurricanes, where everything had to happen at once and nothing was stable. That is a room with urgency and opportunity at the same time, lives upended, and a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild something better than what existed before.

Emergencies. Complex rooms with time to get it right. Rooms where both are true at once. Different conditions, same need: a process designed on purpose, not assembled on the fly, by people who run this work and nothing else.

If you are looking at a room like any of these, whatever else is true about it, I'd like to talk about what that could look like.

06/12/2026

Confluence President Berrick Abramson joined Henry Sobanet & Scott Wasserman on Crux Politica to talk about making smart policy through collaboration, engaging those most informed or affected by policy and everyone approaching the process with decency and good intentions.

Give the show a listen/watch and follow Crux Politica

Watch the full episode & subscribe to Crux Politica’s YouTube at https://youtu.be/AWruhqZYmiE?is=DyOx_j9LcVj2wqaV

06/12/2026

Managing budgets is tough work - on the expense and revenue side - and always involves difficult decisions. Authentically engaging those directly affected makes the decisions not only improved but-in, it more importantly improves the decisions themselves. Honored to help lead these conversations.