latest additions to the Twennie library

Studies and interviews confirm that play is not just for children—it is vital for adults too. Michele Rochon-Wood’s own interviews with professionals revealed a common progression of play: stress relief, restoration, creativity, engagement, and renewed confidence. Play preferences develop in childhood and shape career choices, preparing us for adult challenges. This video introduces Twennie’s strategies for weaving play into the workplace, where it can create healthier, more productive, and more creative teams.

This experimental prompt set continues our research into how play can enhance productivity. This time we focus on authenticity, mental health, a sense of purpose, and stimulating environments. Each activity is designed to be short and practical: sharing quirks, taking mindful pauses, reflecting on the human impact of technical projects, or refreshing your workspace with small creative touches. After each prompt, notice how you feel: calmer, more motivated, or more connected to your work.

This is an experimental prompt set designed to test how different types of playful breaks affect your mood and productivity. The activities focus on four areas: movement, laughter, creativity, and connection with others. Each prompt is a quick break-time exercise — from Fit-Bit step challenges to funny awards, sketching games, or meaningful conversations. After trying a prompt, notice how you feel: more energized, more relaxed, or more focused.

Community doesn’t happen by accident. It’s created through rituals, kindness, and shared experiences. This set provides 20 simple, playful activities that encourage coworkers to connect and care for one another. Start small by asking about daily wins, swapping snacks, or writing thank-you notes. Then grow into group rituals like team playlists, travelling trophies, or monthly trivia contests. Over time, these activities evolve into cultural anchors that bring people together, spark joy, and build pride in the team.

Authenticity is more than honesty — it’s allowing your quirks, stories, and real self to show up at work. This prompt set uses play to help you practice in small, approachable ways. You’ll rediscover childhood joys, share personal sayings, laugh about guilty pleasures, and create space for self-care and validation. These activities build confidence by reminding you that your true self — imperfect, funny, thoughtful. Whether you’re giving out notes of encouragement, swapping quirks with a coworker, or creating a silly award for yourself, each prompt brings a touch of humanity back to the workplace and strengthens your ability to engage with others authentically.

This prompt set offers 20 short, low-cost activities designed to bring a spark of playful creativity into your workday. From paper plane contests to Post-It galleries, to storytelling games with everyday objects, each prompt nudges you to see familiar materials in new ways. By incorporating small moments of creative play into daily routines, you’ll keep creative muscles active, strengthen team culture, and make the workplace more vibrant.

Learn the skill of engaging others. This prompt set helps you engage people through the power of play. With 20 practical prompts, you’ll learn to use humor, curiosity, and simple games to build stronger connections with coworkers and clients. From playful conversation starters to energizing meeting challenges, these activities create laughter, reduce stress, and make interactions memorable. Play transforms ordinary moments into opportunities for trust, rapport, and collaboration.

Play can be healing and therapeutic, especially if you incorporate caring for others. Play is fun and energizing, and moreover, restores and rejuvenates the working mind. A restorative and playful culture gives your organization the ability to self-heal from the daily bumps and bruises inevitable in a competitive marketplace. The best part? People won’t have to take six-week vacations or four mental health days per month to do it.

Letting go is an important skill for anyone who works in teams or interacts with customers and clients...so it’s good for everyone. Release is about blowing off steam, yes, but it’s also about letting go. Anger and frustration are inevitable. Employees will disagree and sometimes, they must enforce unpleasant limits upon one another. Tension is inevitable. Confrontation will happen. Sometimes release is the one thing people need before they can move forward and start working as a team. If you want to blow off steam and learn to let go, register for this prompt set.

Opportunities to develop business pop up every day, all around you. The opportunities might not always be in the form of new projects. They might be changes in legislation. They might be the names of new people working in client organizations. They might be climate change or the advent of new technology. The challenge is to pay attention and think creatively about what the future might bring, and more importantly, how to be in the right place at the right time.

This prompt set is full of office-appropriate gags and activities that lighten the air, strengthen relationships, and relieve stress. Completing one of these prompts a week or month, either as an individual or group, promotes teamwork, creativity, and togetherness. Resist the urge to stop your team from having fun together once in a while! Teams that play together work more effectively together!

This prompt set provides ideas for ways to care. Little acts of kindness every week add up to a more supportive team. A culture of caring develops because team members show that they care about the welfare of the people working next to them, and they do it regularly. This prompt set is an excellent start.

Risk management is a cornerstone of effective project management, as it involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential threats that could disrupt a project's success. By proactively addressing risks, project managers can minimize uncertainty, protect resources, and maintain timelines and budgets. This prompt set challenges your team to analyze how they perform risk management work from the plan to the final deliverables.

Communication is perhaps the most important element of effective project management, and it's not just writing good emails. When managing projects, good communication creates efficiencies, but only if it is managed carefully. This is a skill the whole team has to learn, and they should learn it together, because they will hold each other accountable for the results. This prompt set provides 20 helpful and enlightening group experiences that reveal and strengthen communication skills.

Adapting to a new workplace means more than learning tasks—it requires navigating culture. Five dimensions matter most: relationships, communication, decision-making, and perspectives on individual versus group contributions. Companies differ in how much in-person time is valued, whether communication is formal or spontaneous, and how hierarchical rules shape access to senior leaders. This article gives you a quick look at aspects of culture you must understand when first joining a new team.

Change is difficult for people because of one nagging fear - the fear of failure. Many feel as if they've just settled into a routine in which they can be successful, and change makes things uncertain again. They might be asked to adapt again, and they're not always confident in their ability to do it. This video explains why change is so difficult and how leaders can set the tone for change in a way that inspires and strengthens people, rather than building on their anxiety.

This series is what we call a hub-series, which means it leads to other Twennie series depending on the unique challenges you’re facing in your operations. The diagnostic tools shown in this video are designed to not only help you rescue struggling business units, but to also help you plan your learning and development in a logical sequence, helping you learn, then fix what you must in the short term to develop more revenue. This video is the first in the series, A Systems Approach to (Re)Building a Business Unit.

This prompt set is a quick, anecdotal data-gathering tool that feeds Twennie’s Systems Approach diagnostic. It’s not a test and not a performance review, so there are no wrong answers. We’re looking for short, concrete stories from the last few months that show how things actually work: what was asked, what you delivered, how the client or team responded, and what changed next. Each prompt targets one diagnostic question from five pillars: client relationships, personnel, financials, quality, or schedule.

Each interaction with your client paints a “picture” inside their head of your firm’s strengths and limits. That picture decides how they describe you to others, how they assess your proposals, and whether they’re confident assigning future work to your team. This exercise helps your team plan pull marketing strategies that allow you to take control of that picture, to grab hold of the paintbrush, as it were. The exercise comes with several other units on the subject of pull marketing, including a template that supports the exercise.

The Pull Marketing series reveals how to use pull marketing to strategically shape the “picture” clients hold of your firm. Beyond proposals, it offers fresh, varied strategies that show your expertise, integrity, adaptability, and priorities. This template supports the Pull Marketing Planning Exercise described in the What is Pull Marketing Video.

This series reveals how to use pull marketing to strategically shape the “picture” clients hold of your firm. Beyond proposals, it offers fresh, varied strategies that show your expertise, integrity, adaptability, and priorities. From virtual tours and student competitions to targeted social content and meaningful giveaways, each idea is designed to help clients assess your value and strengthen long-term relationships.

This set offers 20 diverse pull marketing ideas to help you shape the “picture” clients have of your firm. Ranging from large-scale community events to simple, low-cost social media strategies, each scenario invites you to weigh the budget, resources, and alignment with your goals. You’ll build strategic thinking skills, learn to prioritize high-value opportunities, and understand how every interaction can strengthen trust, credibility, and your competitive position.

This article introduces a set of learning units designed for leaders inheriting teams in financial, cultural, or operational crisis. Based on real-world interviews with veteran business unit managers from engineering firms, this series distills their insights into a clear four-stage process: diagnose, plan, implement, and monitor. The foundation contains a set of five core team KPI sets: client relationships, personnel, project finances, quality of deliverables, and project scheduling used throughout to evaluate, improve, and track team performance.

In technical services, great work often goes unnoticed without proactive outreach. But traditional push marketing—cold emails, ads, and proposals—can feel impersonal or ineffective. Pull marketing offers an alternative: it attracts clients to you by making your team’s expertise visible, approachable, and engaging. This article explores what pull marketing means in a technical context and why it works so well in industries where differentiation is difficult.

Stories are needed for your web site, your proposals, and your project profiles. In particular, you will need them if you ever do presentations to new clients. If you have ever sat through a presentation with 100 slides of individual projects and stared at the clock, you’ll know why a few carefully chosen project stories can make a bigger impact than your entire library of projects in a sitting. This video gives you an inside look at how stories are built and why they make your work more meaningful to clients.

This prompt set is designed to help consultants and project teams operationalize the principles of un-commoditizing their services by integrating client-centered value into the fabric of everyday work. While proposals often articulate bold commitments to values like transparency, responsiveness, innovation, and reduced client burden, this prompt set reinforces the small, habitual actions that make those commitments real — and felt — by clients. After completing this set, your team will be accustomed to delivering on important KPIs in project management.

This prompt set is part of the Un-Commoditizing Your Services series on Twennie. This series aims to help a services team enhance their services brand by delivering unique types of value beyond the minimum expected. Those types make the client experience different from what they get from competitors, thus making those clients more inclined to hire you based on something other than price. If you have conducted the Un-Commoditizing your Services exercise and have an un-commoditizing plan in play, completing this prompt set will support your team's efforts.

Once an industry becomes commoditized, consultants can compete on little more than price. Reintroducing meaningful differentiation is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. This one is the display on which you will place your value cards and build several versions of your own value pyramid.

Once an industry has become commoditized, reintroducing meaningful differentiation is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. This document contains the shell of a plan that will formalize the results of the Un-Commoditizing Your Services exercise.

After an industry has become commoditized, reintroducing meaningful differentiation in a commoditized industry is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. Un-commoditizing is a term Twennie uses to describe a process of evolving your services so they can be differentiated on something other than price. This exercise comes with three templates in the same topic.

The Un-Commoditizing Your Services exercise is designed to help teams evolve their services in a way that differentiates them from competitors on something other than price. This template provides the small and large value cards you will use during that exercise. Download and either print or export this document to images you can use in an online collaboration medium.

In a detailed conversation, John Velick shares how he uses ChatGPT to streamline proposal development. By creating dedicated project spaces, training the AI on the company and work, and uploading documents like CVs, RFPs, and technical reports, John is able to generate strong first drafts for everything from project understanding sections to risk management frameworks. AI also helps with rewriting, email drafting, summarizing massive background reports, and spotting gaps in compliance with RFP requirements.

In a detailed conversation, John Velick shares how he uses ChatGPT to streamline proposal development. By creating dedicated project spaces, training the AI on their brand and projects, and uploading documents like CVs, RFPs, and technical reports, they’re able to generate strong first drafts for everything from project understanding sections to risk management frameworks. AI also helps with rewriting, email drafting, summarizing massive background reports, and spotting gaps in compliance with RFP requirements.

For this series, Twennie has drawn from a landmark 2018 Harvard Business Review article titled The B2B Elements of Value by Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn, and Lori Sherer. Building on that framework, we guide Twennie’s learners—especially those in technical and design services—through the process of planning a brand differentiation program using a custom-built “value pyramid.” This pyramid helps you define and deliver value that makes your firm stand out for more than just price. (We recommend reviewing the Twennie article and/or the original HBR article before starting the exercise.)