By JD Woods
(Challenge Set Management, Part One)
Somewhere near the start of my career, long before UX design stood for anything other than an unlucky Scrabble draw, I got a blunt, beautiful bit of wisdom from an HR head named Neal. He said, “John David, a good manager gets the crap out of his people’s way so they can do their jobs.”
No performance matrix. No corporate buzzwords. Just truth. That line stuck with me through multiple industries, market cycles, and digital revolutions. And here’s the twist: it’s even more relevant now.
In today’s knowledge-based economy, we’re not here to count widgets. We’re here to solve real, strategic, often messy problems. And the difference between a team that thrives and a team that merely survives? It’s not ping-pong tables or AI chatbots. It’s the quality of the problems they’re given to solve.
The Challenge Set: Your Hidden KPI
Think of your team’s workload as a “challenge set”, a mix of tasks, obstacles, and mental puzzles. This set has two axes: capacity (how much) and quality (what kind). Most managers know how to measure capacity.
Too many tasks = burnout.
Too few = boredom.
But challenge quality? That’s the unlock.
High-quality challenges build capability, foster creativity, and drive real value. Low-quality ones? They drain morale and waste talent. We’re talking about manual workarounds, broken processes, endless status checks, outdated systems -aka the “why do we still do it this way?” stuff.
From Transactional to Transformational
It’s easy to reward output: sales closed, lines picked, hours logged. But if you want innovation and strategic thinking, you’ve got to flip the scoreboard. The real question isn’t “Did they complete their tasks?” It’s “Were they solving the right problems?”
I like to use a riff on the jen ratio (h/t to Dacher Keltner) to make this practical. Out of 40 things I tackled today, how many felt fulfilling? How many tapped into my real strengths? If the answer is “10 out of 40,” that’s a jen ratio of 0.25—meaning 75% of my day was spent beneath my pay grade.
Sure, I was busy. But was I impactful?
How to Be the Hero Behind the Scenes
If you’re managing a team, your goal isn’t to hand out puzzles or direct fire-fighting efforts. It’s to clear the junk. Automate the manual. Document the tribal knowledge. Eliminate the repeated asks. And then, raise the bar of what deserves your team’s attention.
- Got a designer spending half their day updating old PDFs? That’s a system failure.
- Have a strategist dialing for internal clarity? That’s a process gap.
- Watching your best thinkers get derailed by transactional fire drills? That’s where you step in.
The work we do becomes the organization we build. And the quality of challenges we offer determines the quality of the solutions we get.
If you want better results, stop trying to push harder. Instead, upgrade the problems your people are solving. Make their challenge sets worth the talent you hired. Then step back and smile as they say: “We did it ourselves.”