TWG Strategy

A familiar filter in federal contracting may be about to change.

The Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act passed the Senate this week and is headed to the President. If enacted, federal agencies generally could not require proposed contractor personnel to hold a specific educational credential unless the contracting officer explains in writing why it is necessary for the work.

Federal contractors often build teams around the qualifications written into a solicitation. When a degree or other education requirement appears there, it can shape who a company can propose, how it staffs the contract, and in some cases who is able to compete for the work at all.

The broader question is one that organizations deal with everywhere.

Degrees, years of experience, previous titles, and recognizable employers are often used as shorthand for capability. Sometimes that shorthand is useful. Sometimes the requirement remains in place long after anyone has stopped asking what it is actually supposed to predict.

A stronger talent system starts closer to the work itself: What does someone actually need to be able to do? What knowledge or judgment does the role require? What evidence would demonstrate that capability?

Removing a credential does not mean lowering the standard. It means being more precise about what the standard is.

At TWG, we think that is a useful question well beyond hiring. Requirements are strongest when an organization can explain what capability each one is meant to protect.

If a requirement disappeared tomorrow, could you explain what capability it was supposed to protect?

A familiar filter in federal contracting may be about to change.

The Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act passed the Senate this week and is headed to the President. If enacted, federal agencies generally could not require proposed contractor personnel to hold a specific educational credential unless the contracting officer explains in writing why it is necessary for the work.

Federal contractors often build teams around the qualifications written into a solicitation. When a degree or other education requirement appears there, it can shape who a company can propose, how it staffs the contract, and in some cases who is able to compete for the work at all.

The broader question is one organizations deal with everywhere.

Degrees, years of experience, previous titles, and recognizable employers are often used as shorthand for capability. Sometimes that shorthand is useful. Sometimes the requirement remains in place long after anyone has stopped asking what it is actually supposed to predict.

A stronger talent system starts closer to the work itself: What does someone actually need to be able to do? What knowledge or judgment does the role require? What evidence would demonstrate that capability?

Two employees can both take a job for the paycheck and develop very different relationships to the work over time.

One does good work, but projects repeatedly stall farther up the chain. Decisions drag. Meetings feel one-sided. They may receive praise for doing their part, yet rarely see the work fully land or feel much connection between their effort and the final result.

They may still be an excellent employee. Continued performance does not necessarily mean the environment is working for them.

The second employee may have started for the same reasons: income, security, a stable job. But their effort reliably goes somewhere. Decisions move, other people follow through, completed work produces a visible result, and their contribution becomes part of that success.

Over time, that experience gives them more reasons to stay than they had when they were hired. They build credibility, relationships, knowledge, confidence in their own ability to succeed there, and a stronger sense that their work has weight inside the organization.

Now give both employees a similar offer somewhere else for roughly the same pay.

The first may have very little tying them to that particular organization, even if their performance never dropped. The second is leaving much more than a paycheck.

At TWG, we look at retention and performance in that broader operating context. Organizations do not simply inherit whatever motivation employees arrive with. The way work functions can deepen someone’s attachment to a job, or gradually strip those reasons away.

What does staying here give someone that another paycheck would not?

America.gov launched today, and it is worth paying attention to.

The new site uses AI to answer plain-language questions across federal sources, giving people a single place to search for information that has traditionally been spread across thousands of government websites. Reporting says the platform currently draws from roughly 29,000 federal sites, with plans to eventually support more forms, applications, and renewals in one place.

For anyone who has ever tried to figure out which agency, office, program, or page holds the answer they need, that could make federal information much easier to navigate.

It also changes the starting point for companies working with government. Basic research gets easier. Finding programs, requirements, agency information, and public resources should require less familiarity with how the federal system is organized.

The harder part still comes after you find the information.

Knowing that a program exists is different from understanding who actually owns it, where decisions are made, how funding or procurement moves, whether your company fits the need, and how an engagement should be approached.

At TWG, that is the layer we pay attention to. Better access to information gives companies a stronger starting point. Government relations adds the institutional context, judgment, positioning, and relationships needed to decide what to do with it.

𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮.𝗴𝗼𝘃 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗽 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗶𝘁.

A federal policy change is altering the competitive structure of the mortgage credit-score market.

For years, Classic FICO held an unusually entrenched position in mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA has now opened eligible lending to VantageScore 4.0, and Rocket Mortgage announced yesterday that it will make VantageScore its preferred scoring model for eligible loans beginning this quarter.

The immediate story is about credit scoring. The broader business signal is about how market position is built.

A company can have a strong product, willing buyers, and the ability to compete, yet remain outside a market because an approved standard, procurement requirement, regulatory structure, or institutional preference favors something else. When that condition changes, competitive dynamics can move quickly even if the underlying products have not.

At TWG, we pay attention to government decisions at this level because they can change more than compliance requirements. They can change who qualifies, what buyers can choose, and where competitive leverage sits.

For companies operating in regulated or government-shaped markets, one question is worth revisiting regularly:
What part of our market position depends on a rule that could change?

Most knowledge transfer plans are built around what can be captured: files, procedures, access, contacts, and written processes.

While this is necessary, it is often incomplete.

An experienced employee may know which exceptions are routine and which are risky. They know who needs to be involved before a decision becomes formal, which dependency tends to fail, when a process can bend, and when it absolutely should not. Much of that knowledge is rarely written down because, over time, it becomes part of how the person works.

This becomes especially visible during succession, restructuring, integration, closeout, or turnover. A new owner can inherit a complete set of documents and still spend months relearning the judgment that made the work function.

TWG looks at knowledge transfer as part of ex*****on continuity. The goal is not only to preserve information, but to identify where judgment, relationships, exceptions, and pattern recognition are concentrated before they disappear from the work.

A strong handoff should transfer more than the record of what happened.

It should transfer enough understanding for the work to keep moving.

KPMG’s latest AI Pulse suggests companies are starting to measure AI more broadly than productivity alone. Productivity is still the most commonly reported benefit, but leaders are also pointing to faster decisions, better customer and employee experiences, and stronger financial performance. Organizations are also putting more structure around cost, monitoring, risk, and where human judgment still needs to remain part of the process.

The harder part begins after AI produces something.

An analysis that once took hours may now take minutes, but it can still sit in the same approval queue, wait on the same decision, or move through the same slow handoffs. The work product improved. The larger process may not have changed much at all.

That is where output and outcome start to separate. AI can produce more work, faster. Business value shows up when that work helps the organization make a better decision, free up real capacity, reduce cost, improve quality, shorten a process, or change the customer experience.

For TWG, that is a more useful way to think about AI adoption. The question is not only what the technology produced, but what the organization was able to do differently because of it.

What became different because AI was introduced?

William H. Whyte wrote in 1950 that “the great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.”

That illusion is still easy to create inside an organization. Leadership holds the town hall, sends the email, gives managers the talking points, and reasonably believes the message has been communicated.

But hearing the announcement is not the same as knowing what it changes. Employees may understand what leadership said and still be unclear on which priorities have shifted, what work should stop, who now owns a decision, or what they are expected to do differently.

This is where communication starts to overlap with ex*****on. A message can be perfectly clear and still leave people unable to act if the operational implications have not been worked through. In other cases, the problem is less about the message itself and more about how information moves through the organization or where decisions are still unresolved.

TWG looks at strategic communications in that broader context because delivery alone is a weak measure of whether communication worked.

Can people use it to operate differently?

When work slows down, leadership usually has no shortage of responses: tighter deadlines, more check-ins, clearer expectations, incentives, consequences.

The harder question is whether any of those responses fit what is actually happening.

An employee may be waiting on a decision that never comes. Another may keep watching completed work stall farther up the chain until effort starts to feel disconnected from any real outcome. During a transition, someone may be protecting expertise, ownership, or relevance because finishing the work changes what their role means afterward. Sometimes expectations are clear, resources are there, and the person simply isn't performing.

From above, those situations can look remarkably similar. Psychologically and operationally, they are not.

Motivation is not only something an employee brings to work. The environment also teaches people whether effort leads anywhere, whether their contributions are recognized, whether outcomes feel fair, and what success may cost or create for them.

That is why TWG looks beneath the visible behavior before recommending the intervention.

Slow ex*****on is visible. Its cause usually is not.

The question of who pays for data center growth has been building for some time. Last week, it produced a 417–3 vote in the U.S. House.

H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, would require state utility regulators to consider standards designed to recover from data centers with peak demand of at least 100 MW the costs of utility-system upgrades needed to serve them. States would still retain authority over whether to adopt those standards.

The legislation is not yet law, but the vote adds another signal to a larger infrastructure issue developing around rapid growth in electricity demand.

For utilities and regulators, the question is how to add major new load without shifting disproportionate costs to existing customers. For states and communities, it is how to weigh economic development against infrastructure requirements and long-term capacity. For developers, investors, and technology companies, those same decisions can materially change project economics and where expansion remains viable.

TWG is currently examining these intersections through our work around data center development, energy infrastructure, and government and institutional strategy. The questions increasingly extend beyond whether power is technically available. They include who must invest, who carries the risk, what public decisions are required, and whether the surrounding infrastructure can support the growth being proposed.

The data center boom is becoming an infrastructure planning issue well beyond the data center industry itself.