President, Confluence PSG
Last fall, a 15-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?
Confluence PSG was brought in to design and facilitate that process. What followed over the next several months was a precise illustration of a governance dynamic that shows up across sectors and scales, in transit agencies and corporate boards, in nonprofit leadership crises and public-private partnerships. This is what we learned.
The committee did not disagree about whether the agency faced serious challenges. Stagnating ridership, mounting budget pressures, a loss of public trust, and the absence of a coordinated strategic vision were shared starting points. The disagreement ran deeper than what to do about those challenges. It was about what those challenges meant and where they came from.
Two foundational tensions shaped nearly every substantive conversation. The first: the current structure is not working. The second: democratic legitimacy must be protected above all. Both positions had genuine merit. The dispute was about what each one required in practice.
Nested inside those two positions was a harder question. If the structure is not working, is the problem the size of the board, the way members are recruited and supported, the absence of required expertise, or something else entirely? And if democratic legitimacy is non-negotiable, what does that actually demand? A fully elected board, a hybrid of elected and appointed members, or something in between, and who gets to make that call?
A governance process that jumps from that level of 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. You get either deadlock, or a compromise that papers over the disagreement and unravels later.
Before anyone proposed a solution, we spent sessions working a single question: what problem are we actually trying to solve? This sounds obvious. In practice, it is the step most governance processes skip entirely.
From there, we generated what we call ideas for consideration rather than proposals. The distinction matters. An idea for consideration invites exploration without triggering the defensive positioning that comes with a formal proposal. People can engage with an option, stress-test it, push on its implications, and set it aside without feeling like they lost a vote.
Then came the evidence. The committee received information on how peer transit agencies are structured and heard firsthand accounts from people who work inside those governance models. They were presented with facts and perspectives from people with direct operational knowledge of the specific mechanisms under consideration. One presentation in particular shifted the conversation. The committee had been leaning toward a structural solution that seemed reasonable in the abstract. When they heard from someone with deep working knowledge of how that kind of mechanism actually functions, and when they reconnected with one of the core problems they were trying to solve — that over 40 percent of board races since 1980 had been uncontested — the solution that had looked clean suddenly looked like it solved the wrong problem. The group moved.
One of the most experienced members in the room said something at a certain point that I have thought about since. She told the group that she had come in with a clear view of what was needed. That after listening to subject matter experts, engaging with the research, and hearing from fellow members over several sessions, her thinking on both size and structure had shifted. She said it matter-of-factly, not as a concession. That is what genuine deliberation looks like, and it is rarer than it should be.
Once the committee had a shared factual foundation and a clearer sense of what problem they were actually solving, the voting process was still hard. On board structure alone, the committee considered six different configurations over two sessions. A motion failed. Others were proposed and could not get a second. In the first session, one configuration received a one vote majority of those in attendance, 6 to 5 with three members not present, not enough to meet the 51% (8 vote) requirement to pass.
The same motion came back the following week and passed 11 to 2.
That is not a committee that found easy consensus. That is a committee that worked through genuine disagreement with a structure that kept them at the table long enough to actually hear each other. The near-supermajority on December 17 was not manufactured. It was earned.
The Colorado General Assembly passed legislation this week built directly on the committee’s recommendations. The legislature heard extensive testimony, was lobbied from multiple directions, and made some adjustments of its own. The core architecture the committee produced held.
The RTD Accountability Committee was working on a transit governance question. The underlying dynamic 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. Build a shared evidentiary foundation before you ask people to commit. Create conditions where changing your mind in response to evidence feels like intellectual integrity rather than defeat.
The most common governance failure is not that people disagree about solutions. It is that they disagree about the underlying problem and nobody names that as the thing to solve first. When a board, a leadership team, a commission, or a working group is stuck, the first question worth asking is not “what should we do?” It is “do we actually agree on what is broken?”
If the answer is no, that is where the work starts. Everything else is premature.
Berrick Abramson has designed and facilitated more than 50 work groups, task forces, and multi-stakeholder processes across AI governance, transit, healthcare, education, criminal justice, disability rights, wildfire resilience, and workforce development. He serves on the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, appointed by Governor Polis in 2019 and reappointed in 2023.
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