# About Brent Dixon — the authority record

> Brent Dixon is a strategic facilitator based in Oakland, California. Full professional record with dated affiliations.

By Brent Dixon, Dixon Strategic Labs · 2026-06-15 · Facts last verified 2026-06-12

## Narrative

Brent Dixon is a strategic facilitator based in Oakland, California. He founded Dixon Strategic Labs in 2022 after twenty years working alongside communities and cooperatives, co-designing the systems, gatherings, and tools they use to do their work together.

Brent thinks like a designer, which means he takes complex strategy work and makes it clear, usable, and built for the people who have to live with it. He is also a futurist whose practice covers AI, open banking, stablecoins, emerging technology, experimentation, and strategic foresight. He lives in Oakland, California with his son and a bossy cat named Bug.

## Affiliations

- **Dixon Strategic Labs — Founder (2022–present):** Strategic facilitation for credit unions in the age of agentic AI.
- **United Nations — Innovation lab founder; UN Innovation Network co-chair:** Built the first innovation lab to serve offices across the Secretariat and co-chaired the UN Innovation Network, including a machine-learning project that helped humanitarian workers turn real-time public data into crisis response planning.
- **Filene Research Institute — Founder of The Cooperative Trust; i3 Innovation program lead:** Founded The Cooperative Trust, a community of rising credit union professionals whose original crash of the industry's biggest event became an annual program Filene still runs today, and later led the i3 Innovation program for senior credit union executives.
- **Singularity University — Future of Finance Teaching Fellow:** Mentored and advised teams that secured six-figure funding for their technology startups, one of which was later acquired.
- **Communitere International — Board Chair:** Humanitarian maker space network.
- **Moeda Seeds — Co-founder:** Blockchain cooperative lending platform for Brazilian agricultural cooperatives.

- **20 years** — working alongside communities and cooperatives before founding Dixon Strategic Labs

- **six-figure** — funding secured by startup teams Brent mentored as Singularity University's Future of Finance Teaching Fellow, one later acquired

## Three conditions for strategy that holds up

Brent's framework for the work, drawn from years of facilitation.

1. **Group alignment.** Each participant shares their views privately before the session. That tells the team where they agree and where they disagree, so they can spend their time reconciling the real gaps.
2. **Prioritized choices.** Michael Porter wrote, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Two or three priorities a team can execute will outperform a long list of initiatives all marked "high priority."
3. **Tested bets.** Every strategy is a bet. The question is whether you are improving the odds before you commit. "What would need to be true for this to work?" turns a guess into something you can test, and a tested bet is one a team can adapt when reality shifts.

- [What Is Strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996)](https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy) — the Porter essay the prioritized-choices condition draws on

## Independent assessment

> "I would unequivocally recommend him as a facilitator and guide for your strategic discussions."
> — George Hofheimer, Founder, Hofheimer Strategy Advisors

- **Speaking representation:** Category 6 Consulting

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