When certainty isn’t an option, leaders still have to act. This behind-the-scenes reflection on Challenge Factory’s year captures what we learned about trust, change amidst disruption, and doing hard things that matter.

By Lisa Taylor

At the start of 2025, uncertainty was not theoretical. A new American administration, shifting trade and tariff signals, technological advancement, and global economic and political pressures forced organizations to confront real and potential workforce challenges they had never faced before. Or at least not all at the same time. The stakes were high for our economy, with real consequences for people.

At Challenge Factory, this wasn’t just something happening around us. It shaped our work, our conversations, and the challenges our clients brought to us throughout the year.

In 2024, I chose not to write a year-end message. Warning signs of difficult business conditions, weakening employment numbers, and personal challenges seemed incompatible with hopeful, celebratory messages. It felt more honest to wait and see what the year would require.

In January 2025, I published a blog anchored in a simple mantra: we can do hard things. That framing held. It was a demanding year, marked by sustained effort, difficult decisions, and meaningful progress. For Challenge Factory, it quickly became a year of learning by doing.

Looking back, what stands out most isn’t just how much we learned or what we achieved, but how we worked. Trust and vulnerability mattered more than ever, as did the discipline to focus on what we can control. That approach shaped how we showed up for one another and for our clients when it mattered most.

The work our clients trust us to do

Throughout 2025, we partnered with organizations across the globe that brought us challenges they had not been able to resolve through existing strategies or advisors. These weren’t incremental problems. They were moments where leaders were stuck and traditional approaches had reached their limits.

Our work involved designing career and workforce systems for a new era, and helping leaders make strategic decisions when data is incomplete. In practice, this often meant helping organizations move from information overload that was always too generic to making clear choices about careers, capability, and workforce risk.

We worked across healthcare, technology, government and policy, financial services, higher education, industry associations, and other sectors. While contexts varied, the questions leaders grappled with felt strikingly similar: How do we act before certainty arrives, and what should be we doing now so that next year feels better?

Much of this work happened quietly. True to our B Corp values, we do our best work when we enable others to lead and succeed. Our role is often behind the scenes, but pivotal. By year’s end, clients and partners had clarity they didn’t have at the start of 2025, including targeted workforce strategies, aligned priorities, and real confidence in how to move forward.

Why our work travels

As our work has expanded across four continents and sectors, I’m often asked how clients find us and how we can be effective with such diverse organizations and needs. The answer isn’t that the work looks the same everywhere. It’s that the challenges organizations and leaders face are actually shaped by common underlying drivers and dynamics.

Our work sits at the intersection of people, systems, and future opportunity, where traditional talent solutions are no longer sufficient. We help organizations diagnose what’s breaking down at the system level, then design career and workforce infrastructure that fits their people, strategy, and stage of maturity. We fix Broken Talent Escalators®.

This often means asking hard questions before offering answers, building frameworks where none exist, and helping leaders move forward by creating responsive, flexible roadmaps. What has been most striking is that our expertise in careers, workforces, labour markets, and futures thinking is valued just as much as how we work. Clients trust us to sit with them in moments of doubt and pressure, name what others are avoiding, and build experiments that move from data points to practical impact.

What this year required of our team

Internally, 2025 asked a great deal of our team.

We navigated significant loss, strengthened our operational discipline, paused plans that no longer made sense, and made deliberate choices about where to focus our time and energy. We welcomed new team members while long-standing colleagues stepped into expanded leadership roles. We embedded AI stewardship principles across our services and built the AI literacy required to augment, not shortcut, our work.

Alongside this, we supported one another through personal challenges and celebrated important life milestones like weddings and graduations. In our year-end reflection, team members spoke with pride about integrating AI into their work in thoughtful ways, leading projects without being the subject matter expert, and seeing the impact they could have even when capacity was stretched.

This matters because our clients rely on us for both solutions and sound judgment under pressure. The work they bring us requires a team that can hold complexity, resist false certainty, and stay grounded when the stakes are real.

Looking ahead with intention

As we move into 2026, our focus is clear and our foundation solid. We’re strengthening our use of AI and ensuring our clients aren’t left behind. Growth is intentional at all levels, as individuals, as a company, and with our clients.

Our energy doesn’t come from growth for its own sake, but from the clarity earned through a year of rebuilding and learning.

A final reflection

To our clients who invited us into complex and deeply human challenges, thank you. To the remarkable Challenge Factory team who met uncertainty with care, discipline, and resolve, thank you. And to those facing unsolved problems of your own, know that you don’t have to navigate them alone.

We’re not afraid of the unknown. We understand the messiness that comes with it, the concern and hesitation alongside the excitement and possibility, and how to work through all of it together.

I entered 2025 knowing it would test us. I leave it energized and genuinely hopeful not because the world has become simpler, but because experience has reinforced what we’re capable of when we stay grounded and intentional. As we move into 2026, uncertainty still exists, but so does momentum. Hard years often lay the groundwork for the growth that follows.

2025 was a year of deep learning—personally, professionally, and as a business. 2026 is a year of intentional growth and impact. I feel that possibility deeply, and I hope you do too.

Happy New Year, Challenge Factory community. You, too, have done remarkable, hard things this year.