Building What’s Missing: Aaron Hurst’s New Mission to Reconnect Us

Aaron: Great to see you again. It’s been way too long.

Denver: It sure has. Before Taproot and The Purpose Economy, you were immersed in a Tibetan Buddhist community. Your grandfather shaped ideas for the Peace Corps and the Aspen Institute. From all that, what thread from those early years do you now see as quietly guiding your entire journey?

Aaron: It’s a deep question, Denver. I appreciate that. I think there’s a couple different things. I think one is:  I’m of Jewish descent, but as you said, raised in a Tibetan Buddhist community. So I think in the Jewish descent, there is a sense of  one’s role in society and the importance of questioning, questioning everything, frankly.

And I think from the Tibetan Buddhist side, it was a lot more about being present and understanding relativism, and understanding what is real and what’s not real. So those are, I think, really important themes.

From a more career-oriented perspective, I think my grandfather’s work with the Peace Corps and with the Aspen Institute largely was around his goal, which was to prevent World War III. He had been a naval officer at the end of World War II… part of the Marshall Plan, really saw the devastating destruction of World War and said we’ve got to figure out how to not have a third world war.

And the path he saw to doing that really was: we need to figure out how to bring people together through shared purpose, which is what Aspen and the Peace Corps were about. And that’s really been, I think, as I look at the thread through my career, really echoing that theme of:  How do we help people find shared purpose, which means doing the personal work, which is part of the Jewish and Buddhist tradition?

It means also doing the service work and doing it in community, which I think is very much a legacy in my life from his work.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. You had a wonderful platform in which to start your journey. You know, you…

Aaron: Yeah. I had no idea at the time though. At the time, it’s like you’re immersed in it and you don’t even understand what…

Denver: You don’t know what…

Aaron: And it’s not until you get older, you’re like, Wow, I am ridiculously fortunate.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of the power of reflection.

You came to my attention probably most prominently with The Purpose Economy, and that introduced us to the RIG model: Relationships, Impact, and Growth. Aaron, how has your understanding of those elements shifted in a world reshaped by the pandemic, by AI, and social upheaval?

Aaron: Those things still hold. I mean, I’m doing work now in Latin America. I’m using that same platform, and relationships, impact, and growth really does define what brings fulfillment to our lives.

It is at its core what matters, and that really hasn’t shifted. I think what’s shifted a little bit is: it’s much harder now to build relationships than it ever was. I think right now is a moment where people are asking: How can I actually make an impact? What’s possible in terms of impact?

And I think in terms of growth, there’s just this uncertainty about in what ways I should grow. There’s uncertainty about: What is the opportunity I want to grow to? And I think some of that’s becoming very positive in that it’s causing people to reflect in on personal growth instead of just chasing the next skillset… which to me is ultimately a very positive step forward.

“…nothing in itself has purpose. We create purpose through reflection. So really emphasizing reflection as the primary exercise for learning, starting very early on in children’s life, and then removing transactional frames.”

Denver: I concur. You said, I think, the first time you were on the show, that most Americans are raised in a transactional mindset. What changes would you make in early education to help kids build purpose earlier in their life?

Aaron: Yeah, I think a lot of it is getting away from the cause-based orientation to it and giving kids a chance to actually have purpose in the classroom. Having them help each other, having them think about how they help with their family back at home. It’s giving them the sense of responsibility, versus the world serving them, I think is really critical.

I think the second is: nothing in itself has purpose. We create purpose through reflection. So really emphasizing reflection as the primary exercise for learning, starting very early on in children’s life, and then removing transactional frames.

I’m not naive to think we can get rid of grades, but really thinking about in what ways are we just having people go through the motions to earn something versus  really helping them capture what is their interest and pursuing that, pursuing relationships, pursuing impact, and pursuing growth on their own terms.

And that’s part of where I think AI has a lot of potential, which is: we can really customize and let the student lead much more of the journey. And I think within a few years, we’re going to be seeing a lot more education happening through AI in which it’s really customized to the purpose and personality of the individual student.

And we have to do that in the right way, and there’s so many ways to do that the wrong way. But if we do it the right way, I think it’ll be a huge breakthrough in moving from transactional to purpose mindset.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really an interesting observation because I look at AI and I see the danger of it making us intellectually lazy, but it can also be a real reflection machine, which we tend not to do in this society. We just move, move, move. But to be able to have a tool to help you reflect on what you just did and where you need to go could truly be invaluable.

Aaron: Well, it’s like a friend of mine, I was just talking to him yesterday… he’s writing a book. And at first, the AI was doing a lot of the writing, and he actually told it to change its role and say: “Don’t do any of the writing for me. Just be my editor and push me and challenge me with each paragraph.” And that’s created a much better product.

So I think it’s shifting the role of AI from being the doer to the coach and the one who’s actually challenging you and pushing you to do better and better. And I think that is a change that not everyone’s going to want, but it’s the one that’ll actually create the kind of impact you and I are talking about.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Because otherwise, everything’s going to sound pretty much the same, which I’ve seen already, you know?

Aaron: Absolutely.

Denver: Just spitting it out from the word processor.

Aaron: Everything is universally okay… and there’s no horrible… just a lot of just okay stuff.

Denver: Aaron, let me ask you this. If leaders can’t simply hand purpose to their teams, what can they do? I guess another way of saying that: What does great leadership look like when it’s designed to activate purpose in other people?

Aaron: So I think as a leader, there’s a couple things that you need to focus on. One is reflection, which we talked about earlier. There is no meaning at work unless you add reflection into the daily experience of your employees. And I think what we’ve done with virtual work, what we’ve done with just being more and more efficient, reflection has been squeezed out of the workplace.

And as a result, it doesn’t matter if you’re saving babies all day, like it has no meaning. So we need to fundamentally make space in the day as leaders for reflection, for people to reflect on the relationships or impact on their growth throughout the day. So that’s the number one thing.

The second thing, which has been pretty well studied, is shared purpose. Purpose is a lot more powerful when we feel like we’re all working towards that same purpose. So as a leader, part of your role is to help define that purpose. You can do it basically just out of your own sense of what that purpose is.

Ideally, what you’re doing is you’re forming that purpose together as a group, and then you’re all sort of holding each other accountable to it. But you’re also consistently helping remind people: “Oh, that’s why we’re doing it, that’s why we’re doing it,” like bringing them back to what that purpose is. And you’re helping them see progress where maybe they’re not seeing progress towards it.

So those are sort of broadly the two things I would focus on, is reflection time, and then the cultivation and reinforcement of shared purpose as a team.

Denver: Yeah. And just building on what you said about shared purpose, I have always found interdependencies can be so critical when you realize you really can’t get your job done unless you’re dependent upon somebody else who’s dependent on you.

And you all are in it together because you need each other, and you make that very conscious… that everybody realizes: That’s the way we’re working here.

Aaron: No, I think that’s right. I think unfortunately, a lot of the workplaces, especially with the way we’re built towards efficiency, it’s been minimizing that, which I think just further silos people socially as well because it doesn’t require the interaction.

“So if you think about fixed and growth mindset, and then purpose and transactional mindset, what a lot of people have who are in the purpose space is they have a frame, which is about: you should have a focus on purpose. But it’s a fixed one, like: ‘My purpose is X.’ And when you do that, what you’re actually doing is preventing yourself from growing.”

Denver: Is there a myth about finding purpose, maybe one that you even believed at one time, that you now know is actually probably holding people in place?

Aaron: Well, I think it touches on what we just talked about, Denver, which is a lot of times people think it’s about a cause, and I think I did early on. It was like: What is my cause? Like what is the one thing that I’m meant to do? And that’s a fixed mindset towards purpose.

So if you think about fixed and growth mindset, and then purpose and transactional mindset, what a lot of people have who are in the purpose space is they have a frame, which is about: you should have a focus on purpose. But it’s a fixed one, like: “My purpose is X.”

And when you do that, what you’re actually doing is preventing yourself from growing. You’re preventing yourself from flexing into whatever the environment is that you’re in. The reality is we can find meaning in just about anything. Finding the things that are more meaningful to us is important, and we should sort of move towards that.

But anytime we make an excuse, like: I haven’t found the cause, what we’re doing is we’re putting that responsibility on the external instead of the internal, which goes back to the Jewish and Buddhist startup conversation. It’s like we need to understand that we are the one to generate purpose, not anybody else, and take ownership of that. And then by saying: it’s a cause, we’re not doing that.

“What we really need is a parallel body that is focused on connection, that’s focused on ensuring that in every neighborhood, in every city, we are bringing together all the stakeholders across sectors to really create a collective agenda around connection and work towards that.”

Denver: You’re also tackling one of the defining challenges of our time, which is connection. And that leads us to the US Chamber of Connection… I love it… which is a civic response to social isolation. What inspired the creation of that, Aaron? And how do you define the kind of connection infrastructure it builds?

Aaron: Yeah, great question, Denver. So after my last company, I took a little time off, and really, I was honestly burnt out. We could do a whole another session on burnout and social impact. But emerged from that, last year I turned 50 and really looked at, from a personal perspective, what was most important to me.

And I was actually at a retreat and this guy, Light Watkins said, “What is it you most want in the world right now?” So, Denver, someone asked you: What is it you most want right now? I answered that question saying, “I really want friendship.” Like I’m turning 50, like I know this decade is all about friendship. I’m underinvested in it. I need to work on this.

And then he flipped it on me and said, “Okay, whatever it is you must want is what you need to give.” And I was like, Oh, how do I give friendship, not just to a few people, but how do I give friendship to everyone? So I had this personal motivation around it, but at a societal level, I looked around our country and …What’s going on with our health?

What’s going on with our education? What’s going on with our economy? What’s going on with racism? What’s going on with all these issues? And they all came back to the fact that the decline in connection and trust in our country, I believe, is the issue of our time. Everything else is either a byproduct of it, or we’re not going to be able to address it, unless we address connection.

So here we have the top issue of our time, and few dispute that. Like when you get in a room with people and ask them: What’s the bigger challenge, climate change, connection? Connection, because we’re not going to get to climate change unless we connect. It is the core. But then you look around the country and you’re like, Who’s providing leadership on connection?

We’ve got a totally disconnected community working on connection. We’ve got people in health, we’ve got people in urban planning, we’ve got people in sociology, we’ve got people in democracy. All these fields that are all about connection, they’re not talking to each other. There’s no common frame around it.

And there’s no advocacy in the country at a city level or at a country level saying, Here are the priorities for connection. We need to do something about this. We need to be accountable for it. So I looked at the incredible success of the Chamber of Commerce and how it has made business– the pinnacle of advocacy and organizing in our country– and said, You know what? Connection matters a whole lot more than just commerce.

What we really need is a parallel body that is focused on connection, that’s focused on ensuring that in every neighborhood, in every city, we are bringing together all the stakeholders across sectors to really create a collective agenda around connection and work towards that.

So that’s what we’ve started with the US Chamber of Connection, is a national organization focused on being that mobilizer, that organization that’s able to equip cross-sector leaders to address the issue. To your second question, which is, What does that actually mean? What is the infrastructure? How do we help do that? A big part of it is we need a leadership group that’s cross-sector in every city that’s taking ownership of the issue. Like that’s number one. Like we need that kind of cross-sector leadership.

The second is we need to really think about the narrative of connection in each of our cities. I’m in Seattle, we have an antisocial public stance about connection. That’s actually part of the problem. We need to make sure every neighborhood, every city has a pro-social narrative so that we can actually change the behaviors. And then we really need to figure out what are the key opportunities that we can get cross-sector leaders together on to address.

So in Seattle, Denver, as an example, which I think is actually true for every city, people don’t change much unless they’re in transition. And the transition that matters most is when they’re moving. If you were to move to Seattle, suddenly like besides me, you’d have no friends, you’d have no family here in theory. I don’t know if you do or don’t, but just theoretically.

 You’re open to new friends; you’re open to new connection, to new community, and the community’s open to helping you because they know that you’re in need. So here we have this opportunity in every city to think about: How do we welcome newcomers? Not just immigrants, but the professional, the student who moves across the country.

How can we, just like companies, have onboarding? Just like universities onboard new students. How can we build the infrastructure to onboard new residents? So that we’re not just helping them turn on the lights, we’re helping them turn on connection and community when they first move and make them catalysts for that broader change in the city.

So that’s the work we’ve started. We’re really looking to partner in every city, partner with national organizations to build this infrastructure, and starting to really talk to foundations and companies who haven’t seen connection as a cause. We’re really trying to help educate them to say: No, this is the root cause.

Denver: Yeah.

Aaron: Got to stop just funding symptoms, we’ve got to fund root cause if we’re actually going to turn this around.

Denver: Well, I just moved from New York to Boston. I became a grandfather.

Aaron: There you go.

Denver: And I got up here earlier this year. Do you have a chamber up here?

Aaron: We will, if you start one for me, Denver.

Denver: You and I should follow up.

Aaron: Sounds good.

Denver: I’d be happy to do that. It would be… because you know what? You’re so right. It’s very difficult to make new friends at 50, for instance. You can make them easier when you’re younger. You actually can make them easy when you have little kids, but once your kids grow up… you don’t…. It’s awkward.

It’s sort of like being 50 and wanting to take swimming lessons. It’s like I don’t want to feel like a fool in the pool. So you never learn how to swim. And I think a lot of it… we should talk… I’ll try to do something if that makes sense.

Aaron: Yeah, no, it’s such a need, and I think that there’s that sort of empty nest moment where I think there’s a huge need. The biggest population of need is actually young adult men.

Denver: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Aaron: …Loneliness, especially white and Black men.

And I think that’s why we’re looking at: How do we really make an impact there? You’re absolutely right about the emptiness, the 50-plus crew needing that help, especially again, men. We are just really bad at building connection, and we really require activities. We haven’t been trained to have real conversations. There’s so many barriers that we’ve created in society for connection.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. My observation, which may not be accurate, is that men are pretty much as close to each other as girls until about the age of 15, and then they go their own way. And I agree to a large degree, our connections are usually based around activities.

So, I can play golf with you, Aaron, and you want to go to the Yankee game or something like that. But get together for a cup of coffee to talk? I don’t think so. You know what I mean? It’s always got to be activity-driven and we’re almost at a loss when that activity is not central to us meeting with each other.

Aaron: I think that’s right. I think they talk about men like to connect shoulder to shoulder versus women face to face.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. 

Aaron: That is part of it. I mean, I’ve always had most of my friends be women and gay men for whatever reason. And I think that’s because I love connection. So I’m sort of drawn to the coffees, to the walks, what have you.

But I think that’s absolutely right, and as a result, we don’t learn. We don’t learn the skills. So I’m just saying earlier, like even the cliche American father-son playing catch is like not a social, conversational activity. Like you’re too far apart. You’re just finding a way to  be in the same space, share an experience, but you’re not actually getting to know each other, supporting each other.

Denver: No. You go back in the house, and the son goes to his phone, and the dad goes to the game on TV, and they sit there and ask mom when dinner’s going to be ready. And that’s pretty much it.

Aaron: There is a lot of that, so I think we’ve got a lot of work to do there. I do think this newcomer piece is the easiest way for us to quickly make a difference and to rally our cities around it. And it’s something that mayors want to get behind because they want newcomers to know who they are to vote for them, to get engaged.

Nonprofits want them as donors. They want them as volunteers. Arts organizations want them to sign up and start going to their museums. The local coffee shop wants them as a customer. The local Toyota dealership wants to sell them a car.

Denver: Everybody wins.

Aaron:  Let’s take all of those aligned incentives and change our cities based on becoming welcoming.

“Our fundamental belief is that nonprofits generally are priced out of, mostly based on scale, senior strategic technology talent. And as a result, they’re not working with technology in a strategic way, and they’re not bridging into the tech community very effectively. It’s generally very junior folks, and they can’t afford otherwise.”

Denver: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have pride in your city. Well, you’re never short of ideas, and another one that you’ve come up with, which I love, is Board.Dev. What was the deeper problem that led you to create that organization, and what gap in nonprofit governments are you trying to fill?

Aaron: Yeah, so this was actually part of… when I ran the Taproot Foundation, this is something I started working on, but then I left…. Unfinished business in a lot of ways.

So the first insight, Denver, we had is we’re looking at pro bono service and looking at… we got to the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world, and we realized we’re barely helping anybody relative to the need. We’re like… there’s no way we can scale programs to solve this. We’ve got to figure out how to change the systems.

So I did a couple years of work just trying to understand what systems need to be changed to actually make pro bono service available to every nonprofit in a way it’s self-sustaining. And when I looked for… this is my favorite term, “positive deviance,” those that are actually doing things differently, but it’s working for them. When it came to this, what they all did is they had senior executives on their boards in functional areas. 

So they’d have like a marketing exec, a tech exec, an HR exec, and they were regularly partnering with the ED to identify what were the needs, and then they were pulling from their networks the talent in. And they were creating accountability because there was that social connection between them.

So it really struck me at the time that if we’re ever going to really create a sustainable model for the transfer of business talent and technical talent into the nonprofit sector, it’d have to be through the boards. So put that on pause. When I left my last company, I was like: I want to get this going again and connected with Alethea Hannemann, who is my head of programs back at Taproot and said, “Let’s get this going. I don’t want to run it, but will you be the CEO of this?”

And we started with technology. Our fundamental belief is that nonprofits generally are priced out of, mostly based on scale, senior strategic technology talent. And as a result, they’re not working with technology in a strategic way, and they’re not bridging into the tech community very effectively. It’s generally very junior folks, and they can’t afford otherwise.

So what we really need, if we’re going to close the tech gap in the nonprofit sector, we need senior technologists on boards who are bringing that strategic point of view to the table, but they’re also bringing the resources. They’re also helping think through risk. They’re also thinking through long-term strategy, like  where we’re going in terms of AI, et cetera.

So what we’ve built is an organization that’s focused on two things. One is working largely with companies to train and place their tech execs onto nonprofit boards, so they actually can be constructive. Because just putting a tech leader on a board does not produce results; it creates a mess usually. So how do we train them, and how do we actually support them for their full first year on a board, not just sort of train them?

So that’s  one part of the work. The second part is we built the Nonprofit Tech Congress. And the goal of that is to say we need to get the best minds and nonprofit technology in a room regularly to look at: What are the standards? What are the best practices? What do we want to share with all these tech execs on boards to help them be as effective as possible, to create that sense of a governance of technology?

And it’s been this incredible group of people from across… some tech in business foundations, nonprofits coming together and looking at questions like: How should nonprofits be thinking about AI? Or with all this going on in our country right now: What can we learn from nonprofits in Russia about how they operate when they’ve got a government that is snooping around all the time?

Like, what can American nonprofits now learn about that, given where we see our country going? We’re looking at these core issues so that we can be advisory to all these tech leaders on boards to be able to help their organizations accelerate their impact and mitigate their risk.

Denver: Something that’s so needed. You’re right. I believe that nonprofits, Aaron, always have looked at tech as a cost center and not as a mission center or something like that. So they just tamp it down because they can’t afford it, and they also have blinders on. We are just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to meet mission that we have no idea of what’s going out.

What have been some of the milestones that you’ve reached with Board.Dev that you’re particularly proud of, that show an awful lot of promise for organizations going forward?

Aaron: I love that. Some milestones… I mean, we’ve had thousands of people get on webinars and download content around this topic, so that’s been really encouraging. Working, I think, now with a dozen major companies around the placement of their execs on board. So that’s been really encouraging.

I think we’ve also just seen this topic is now getting onto the conference agendas and into the publications for the sector. So we’re starting to see the influence that way. But it’s still early days. I mean, we’re really just a startup, so I don’t want to claim that we’ve: Mission Accomplished! We really are just starting to seed this movement.

And the goal is to go from just doing technology to: we will eventually want to add in: What is brand governance, human capital governance… these other areas where there is a need for similar infrastructure to be put in place?

Denver: You have… how many Aaron Hursts are there, by the way? Is it you… the only one?

Aaron: Aaron Hurst?

Denver: Or about six of you?

Aaron: I don’t know how many Aaron Hursts there are. I have actually… I’ve reached out to a few Aaron Hursts on LinkedIn. I had some conversations, which has been fun, but there are 600,000 Aarons in the United States.

Denver: Oh, I knew you would have that number off the top of your head, but you are doing so much. So let me close with this, Aaron, because we could go on all day. What question are you still living into? What frontier is calling you, Aaron, right now?

Aaron: I mean, I’m living in that right now, Denver, with the connection work. I think at a personal level, I’ve always built movements, but then have never actually been a part of the movement. And even just on a small scale… So when I moved to Dolores Park in San Francisco, there were tennis courts there, and I really wanted to play tennis. And I was like, Oh, how do I find a tennis partner?

I posted on Craigslist, which at the time was the place you posted, and got flooded with like dozens and probably hundreds of people wanting to play tennis. So I created the Dolores Park Tennis League, set that up. Every court was filled all the time with people through that. I never played a game of tennis.

And I think that’s the story as a social entrepreneur, like building these things but not being able to actually benefit or be in that community. So one of the things on a personal level… question I’m leaning into is: How can I actually have connection in my life in a meaningful way while building a movement around connection, and not just be the administrator and spokesperson for it?

And I don’t know the answer to it. Like I’ve done… I’ve had hundreds of people over for dinner at my house in the last year, but they come over… we have this amazing dinner as a group, talk about connection, and then they go. And like, I’m onto the next; I’m focused on the next city, I’m focused on the next thing. And really struggling with: How do I actually build connection in my life while helping others do it?

Denver: You remind me a little bit of a guy I used to work very closely with, Fred Lebow, who was the director of the New York City Marathon, and I worked with him for many, many, many years. And he just built an incredible race.

But it wasn’t until after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, near the very end of his life, said, “I’ve never run this marathon.” And he got out there, and he ran the marathon and he said it was the greatest moment of his life. And I hear you sort of saying, I’m building these things.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a player instead of going on to the next one? Would that be right?

Aaron: Hopefully it won’t take brain cancer to do that, so…

Denver: Hopefully it won’t. Well, I should ask this. You talked about so many amazing things, Aaron. If listeners want to find out more about this work, whether it be the chamber, Board.Dev, et cetera, what’s the easiest way for them to learn more and get involved?

Aaron: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn. Chamberofconnection.org is the domain for that work, and board.dev literally is the domain for that work, but we’d love to get you involved. And we’re especially looking for companies and foundations that really want to be pioneers.

I think we’re in a moment in time right now where there’s a lot of destruction happening. But it’s also a time where we can plant seeds for the future of our country, and this is that moment. And doing that around connection is the most  fertile seed that you can plant, if that makes sense.

Denver: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron: And just would love to hear from people about: How do they want to be a part of reconnecting our country?

Denver: Yeah. Let’s make the most of this moment, It’s been handed to us. We can only do what we can with it. Play the ball as it lies.

Aaron: Exactly.

Denver: I want to thank you so much for being here today, Aaron. It is always such a treat to have you on the show.

Aaron: Oh, so great to be with you. I’m excited to work with you in Boston to see if we can get something going there.

Denver: We will.