Seth Derner It is an honor and a privilege for me to be here. I want to tell you why we're here. I was born in 1975 and I remember growing up and seeing a movie called County about farm families that were forced off the land. When you're about 6 or 7 those things make an impression. My parents told me that I need to get a good education and find better opportunities than what I could find in my home state. I thought to myself, "Why do we have to leave to find good opportunities?" I want to find something here. That is the purpose of FutureForce. We want our communities to thrive and we want to create careers that are exciting and rewarding so our young people want to stay and make sure they have the kinds of opportunities that will continue to grow the industries that will make Nebraska and our communities thrive.

We each have roles in this situation. We need to create alliances and awareness. We don't want our kids to hear that same message to hurry up and get out so they can have good lives. This first activity we started off with today is about helping us see the kinds of opportunities we can create for our young people

I'd like to turn it over to Dan Mauk. He is the president of the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce. He helps us bring perspective to the kind of work we're doing today.

Dan Mauk I want to welcome you on behalf of the Workforce Boards of Nebraska. We have a unique opportunity to create something exciting here. We have people here involved in workforce development, economic development and education among others, and we have a chance to create partnerships here.

The first question we often get on any prospect is, "Can you fill the jobs?" I hate to say it, but we can't. When we have to turn these kinds of things down, it hurts. Just bringing in new companies is not going to solve our problems.

There are some trends that are happening we need to be aware of. I represent the generation of the baby boomers and we're going to be exiting the workforce in a very short time. This will create a large vacuum. The people entering the workforce today represent only half of us who are leaving. Even in Omaha, we're faced with exporting young people who we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars educating. Yet we have parents who tell their kids that they need to leave to find a future.

I went to Anaheim to attend a conference and was expecting to find a lot of answers. There were a lot of luminaries and we were in the center of innovation. Yet, I found the same question and no answers. We're all facing the same crisis. Maybe today we'll come up with some partnerships that will bring us to some solutions. I'm really impressed with InnovationLabs already and I think we're really going to have a great session.

Rich Katt My job is working with technical preparation education and from the Perkins grant we have the opportunity over the next 6 years to invest $45 million into the secondary and post secondary education. We wanted to have a forum to see if we're doing the right things and come up with priorities for how we would spend this money. We know that in the schools we're trying to satisfy our mission of creating a student who can thrive in the 21st century.

I have a 14-year old son and that gives me an interesting perspective. The other night I see my son with his iPod headphones on. and I walked up to him assuming of course, that he was goofing off. I found out that he was working on a project with 4 other kids online, creating a PowerPoint, chatting by instant messaging, and listening to his music at the same time. It made me wonder how is he going to survive sitting in a classroom that is set up in rows and forced to just watch a teacher at the front of the room.

InnovationLabs is a phenomenal group and they've helped us over the last few years in rethinking the high school experience. It made sense when we wanted to bring this group together here that we would hire some professionals to help us do this.

Tomorrow we're going to keep a smaller group together to focus on the Perkins grant and decide how we're going to distribute it. We want to make sure we take advantage of that open slate. One of my passions is reading futuristic stuff and last night I read an article that companies are now going after early retirees for second careers. And I thought I was done! (laughter)

I want to remind you that it's important to speak up and bring your opinions. We want to hear what you have to offer.

Michael Kaufman Michael: What are the qualities of the best meetings you've been in?

Responses:

Michael: We can handle all of these, though I don't know about short. Though if you look at the fact that some of the smartest minds have not figured this out. I think a day is pretty short.

We've worked with every kind of organization you can imagine and design each session individually. We will take you through a series of activities in which you will be required to make something and then share what you make with the rest of the group. I can tell you know that you will not have enough time to solve the entire assignment, but you will have an opportunity to cycle back around to look at the activity from different perspectives. We work in parallel. That means you won't get to see all the activities all the time. You'll have to trust your colleagues are doing good work as well.

There are no formal breaks. We trust you know how to take care of yourselves. We just ask you to be aware of your impact of your team. We know you are all extremely busy, but the more you can keep your attention here, the more productivity you will have. Let's keep the distractions to a minimum.

We document your work. Diane is building a website of all your work real time and this will be available to you at the end of this session so you can have all the output of your work. We have a variety of tools for you to use to do your work, such as the rolling white walls. We're not going to have formal introductions but the process is designed so that you will meet each other through the activities.

Our objectives here is to start the conversation. We don't expect to have an endpoint to this. Because of the groups represented in this room, we have a great opportunity in making partnerships. We want to start attacking the challenges that are before us and put some action plans inn place. This process runs like a boat leaving the dock. We have a plan, but once we leave the dock our course may change. I have a reputation of pushing people. I will try to allow the conversations to go as long as they can, but at some point, in the interest of productivity, I will have to move you along and I would appreciate your help with that.

The final thing I want to say is that we're not looking for consensus. Everybody does not have to sign the constitution here. We want to have the creative conflicts that come up with differing opinions.

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