The energy at this year’s ASU-GSV summit in San Diego reminded me of COMDEX’ heyday. Every venue was overflowing and lunches ran out early. We all suffered from CSCD; Concurrent Session Cognitive Distress.
Oh, and everyone was AI-curious — and skills-based concerned. Paul Fain calls them the billion-dollar questions:
The hype cycle for AI may be just beginning, predicts one summit attendee. But skills-based hiring appears to have entered the trough of disillusionment.
Still, most presenters were convincing that the intersection of the two will accelerate us away from credentials-based careers.
My most memorable interactions were with folks I didn’t expect to see. A former colleague now-college President whose family has had a rough cancer year. A friend who is just venturing from philanthropy to the glamorous (sic) start-up life. Folks I’d met with just the week prior in D.C. And everyone seems to know — and wanted to chat about — Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (who also visited). ( I should have a stream of selfies here — but I forgot to take ‘em…)
All of which reminded me how rewarding and inspiring communities of interest and practice are for us humans. And how much more quickly we learn from them than from our most algorithmically-refined feeds.
Every impactful initiative I’ve been involved with had community — of interest and practice — at the center. The most enduring attribute of most of these initiatives has been the communities they’ve created.
The power of the Greater Washington Partnership is the 50+ CEOs with long-term shared interests in transit, talent and inclusive growth (importantly, the group initially formed around specific shared goals; to chase the Olympics, then to recruit Amazon HQ2. Morphing from transactional to long-term goals is… hard). The National Talent Collaborative is an emerging community of practice of groups like and including GWP, all focused on talent.
Our fledgling Colorado Mass Timber Coalition is comprised of 40+ stakeholders with a shared concern for forest and watershed health, and de-carbonizing the built environment. It’s developing close connections to peer groups with the same focii in Oregon, Maine and Michigan. The U.S. Forest Service helps curate those connections.
We started the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network in Colorado around the thesis that tightening the network of serially-successful entrepreneurs across sectors statewide would help mature our early start-up ecosystem into an enduring scale-up economy. It worked.
The 40 folks behind the Colorado Project have worked for a year across party lines and regions around the shared interest in a sustainable, inclusive growth future for the state. And a shared understanding that these are all interconnected.
The Colorado Media Project was launched 8 years ago by a community of folks interested in preserving local journalism; the News CoLab developed as a way to share best practices across that community.
I’ve recently worked with a diverse national group with a shared interest in rallying our Defense and national security interests to accelerate the development of the workforce of the future.
This Federal administration, and in particular Secretary Raimondo’s Department of Commerce, has learned the value of curating community. The Build Back Better program launched without providing funds for operating overhead — which left recipients managing a hodge-podge of disconnected projects. Subsequent CHIPS Act efforts like TechHubs not only provide this funding, but will also administer national communities of practice for all recipients.
Ecosystems replicate successful models quickly. Many of the 400 TechHub applicants beyond the 31 designees are continuing to build their communities. Colorado is directly supporting three of the tech hub projects that weren’t designated as national tech hubs, in addition to our Elevate Quantum project, which was. (Fully fund CHIPS and Science!)
Community is hard work. The more diverse the members, the more robust and rapid the learnings. And the more diverse the group, the more work required to identify and remain focused on specific shared interests and best practices. That’s particularly challenging with CEO-led groups, which often originated as exclusive clubs of wealthy older white men.
COVID crushed community. I didn’t meet my Board of Directors for GWP in person until almost two years into my tenure as CEO (most common comment? ‘You’re way taller than I thought!’ I must schlump on zoom). That sucked.
And remote work and digital relationships via AI algorithm can accelerate anomie and dilute trust, an essential ingredient in successful communities.
And yet — we advance with each other faster than via AI;
As AI infiltrates our homes, schools, and workplaces, better measures can reveal whether young people’s networks are growing or contracting; whether the quality of their human connections is deepening or deteriorating; and whether their muscle to interact with the peers and adults in their lives is strengthening or atrophying.
I advise many efforts to get employers to work collectively to drive change in our workforce and educational pathways. In my experience, communities of practice around specific shared interests are necessary prolegomena to any future collective commitments. Scope matters. Smaller ecosystems need to rightsize their aspirations (the NY Jobs CEO Council is awesome — but has Jamie Dimon, Julie Sweet and a bunch of $250k per-year employers as members). Vertical industry employer groups with shared interest in new workforce pathways are driving apprenticeships across the U.S. All employers share an immediate interest in best practices around the inexorable shift to AI-denominated, lifelong skills based learning and careers.
I do like all the corgis and mini-huskies (here’s Kebo, gone now for a few years) in my Instagram feed, and share ‘em incessantly (ergo more). But lasting change needs more than instafication.
Shared understanding of shared interests, and work together on those as a community of practice can lead to scaled, quantified commitments and durable change.