Confluence Policy & Strategy Group

05/14/2026

Policy take: triggers not principles

On technically complex policy questions, you can get a room to agree on principles faster than you might expect.

Protect consumers from harm caused by AI. Do not create compliance burdens so onerous they chill innovation. Make the rules clear enough that businesses can actually follow them. Hold the right parties accountable when something goes wrong.

In a multi-stakeholder process I recently facilitated on AI governance, there was broad agreement on all of those within the first few sessions.

Then we started writing definitions.

The fights that followed were not about whether consumers deserved protection. Everyone agreed they did. They were about what "materially influences" meant when an AI system is one of several inputs into a decision a human still makes. They were about whether liability for AI-related harm should be broad and general or specifically anchored to violations of existing anti-discrimination law. Every word in each of those definitions determined who the law reached, what it required, and what it cost to comply.

The principle was easy. The trigger was nine months of work.

This is the dynamic that makes technically complex policy so hard to get right, and so easy to get wrong. Legislation that resolves at the level of principles feels like agreement but produces chaos in implementation. The compliance officer trying to build a program around it cannot tell her team what they actually have to do. The regulator trying to enforce it cannot explain what a violation looks like. The consumer trying to invoke it cannot tell whether the harm they experienced is covered.

The real test of any complex policy framework is not whether the principles command support. It is whether the definitions are precise enough to govern behavior, specific enough to enforce, and fair enough that the parties who negotiated them can all live with the result.

That last part is harder than it sounds. Precise enough to govern and fair enough to hold a coalition together are not always the same thing. Sometimes they are. When they are, you have something worth passing.

05/11/2026

Most negotiation processes start with someone's first draft. Everyone else spends their time pushing back against it rather than building something together.

The CDMP approach we use at Confluence PSG starts somewhere different: with what every person in the room actually cares about and why. Not their position. Their reasoning.

Two recent processes, one on transit governance reform and one on AI policy, show what that looks like in practice and why the sequence matters more than most people expect. The horse trading that produced results nobody loves and everybody likes came later. The work that made it possible came first.

New post on the Confluence PSG blog:

Most groups that are brought together to solve a hard problem want to start negotiating immediately. That instinct is understandable. The people in the room are experienced. They have positions. They have organizational mandates and limited time. They are ready to get to work. The problem is that th...

05/07/2026

New blog post: A governance process that jumps from disagreement straight to proposed solutions almost always fails. People vote on proposals before they share an understanding of the problem. The vote becomes a proxy for the underlying dispute rather than a resolution of it.

A 14-member committee convened to answer one of the harder questions in regional governance: what would it actually take to make a large, complex, and struggling regional transit agency work the way it needs to?

05/06/2026

On Monday, the Colorado General Assembly passed SB26-150, the Modernizing the Regional Transportation District Act, legislation built directly on the recommendations of the RTD Accountability Committee, a 14-member body charged with one of the harder governance questions in regional transit: not just what to change, but whether the existing structure was even the right thing to fix.

That question is harder than it sounds. The committee did not disagree about whether RTD faced serious challenges. They disagreed about what the challenges meant. Two foundational tensions ran through nearly every conversation. The first: the current structure is not working. The second: democratic legitimacy must be protected. Both were true. The dispute was about what each one required.

Inside those two positions lived a harder nested question. If the structure is not working, is it the size of the board, the way members are recruited and supported, or the people themselves? And if democratic legitimacy is non-negotiable, what does that actually demand? Full election, some appointment, or something in between, and who gets to decide?

A governance process that jumps from that level of disagreement straight to solutions almost always fails. People vote on proposals before they share a diagnosis, and the vote becomes a proxy for the underlying dispute rather than a resolution of it.

What moved this committee was sequence. Before anyone proposed a solution, we spent sessions on a single question: what problem are we actually trying to solve? From there, we generated ideas for consideration rather than proposals, a deliberate step that lets people explore options without committing to them. We brought in evidence: data on elected versus appointed boards across peer agencies, testimony from transit board members in other regions, research on board size and governance effectiveness. Members who came in with strong positions found themselves asking different questions once they had a shared factual foundation.

Then came the motions. On board structure alone, the committee considered six different configurations over two sessions. A motion for a 9-member board saw a vote of 6 to 5 with three members not present in the first session, two votes short of the threshold set in the Committee bylaws. The same motion passed 11 to 2 the following week. The difference was not persuasion in the conventional sense. It was that the room had moved from debating positions to examining a problem together, and when that shift happens, people can change their minds without feeling like they lost.

The legislature examined the committee's process closely. They heard extensive testimony, were lobbied hard from multiple directions, and had their own questions about the 9-member hybrid board the committee ultimately recommended. They passed the bill.

This pattern is not specific to transit. Any governance challenge where the people in the room disagree about what is broken before they disagree about how to fix it requires the same discipline: define the problem before you generate solutions, generate options before you force votes, and build a shared evidentiary foundation before you ask people to commit. The structure of the problem is the same whether the room is a transit agency board, a corporate governance review, a nonprofit in crisis, or a public-private partnership trying to decide who is actually in charge.

More on what that process looked like and what it produced on Thursday.

Bill text and history: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-150

04/23/2026

Manitou Springs, Colorado. There’s a reason people have been coming to this town for 150 years. Some places are more relaxing and inviting to do work in than others. This is one of them.

03/27/2026

For strategic planning & priority setting, we love to get leaders away from their offices or chambers to a comfortable place, away from the daily work. When the conversation involves systems thinking, sometimes you just need to get the Mayor, City Council and Department Directors out on the playground to not just visualize but feel and experience the effect of decisions on systems.

03/23/2026

When we get called in, it’s usually because something has been stuck for a while.

Not because the issue is new. Not because the stakeholders are impossible. But because no one ever stopped to ask whether the process was actually built to produce an outcome.

Last week we released a white paper that walks through how we think about that — what it takes to design and run a collaborative process that delivers, not just one that convenes.

Free at www.confluencepsg.com/breakinggridlock

If you’re dealing with something that’s been stuck, we’d like to hear about it.

03/19/2026

“We got the right people in the room. It still didn’t work.”

We hear this constantly. And almost every time, the problem wasn’t the people.

It was that nobody designed the process.

Who facilitates isn’t the same as who leads. Representation isn’t the same as alignment. Agreement in the room isn’t the same as holding that agreement when people walk out.

Our white paper released this week gets into exactly that. Free at confluencepsg.com.

www.ConfluencePSG.com/BreakingGridlock

03/18/2026

Today we're releasing The Power of Collaborative Decision Making: Breaking the gridlock on even the most complex and contentious issues.

This white paper is for leaders navigating complex, high-stakes issues where the path forward is blocked by political conflict, stakeholder misalignment, or fractured public trust.

It covers: → What CDMPs are and when to use them → The design principles that separate momentum from failure → The facilitator's role — and why it matters more than most leaders realize → How to build legitimacy, not just decisions

Download it free at confluencepsg.com.

If your organization is considering launching a task force, commission, or cross-sector initiative, we'd be glad to talk.

https://confluencepsg.com/breakinggridlock

The Power of Collaborative Decision Making is a practical guide to breaking through gridlock for government leaders, agency directors, and policy professionals who need more than good intentions. It covers the full arc of a Collaborative Decision Making Process — from deciding whether to use one, ...

03/13/2026

We've seen what happens when these processes are designed well. We've also seen what happens when they're not. The difference rarely comes down to the issue, the politics, or the stakeholders. It comes down to the design.

Full white paper drops next week.

03/11/2026

If everyone’s talking and nothing’s moving, the problem isn’t the issue. It’s the process.

Final piece in our CDMP series is live. Full white paper drops next week.

https://confluencepsg.com/now-more-than-ever/