Every team has problems it talks around. A customer keeps churning, a hire is three months late, a process breaks every Friday. They come up in passing, everyone nods, and next week they come up again. Challenges in Clarion give those problems a place to live: written down, ranked by the people closest to them, owned by someone, and worked until they’re actually resolved.
Raise it in seconds
A challenge needs a title — “Sales pipeline is stalling” — and optionally a description of what’s happening and why it matters. Give it a priority: high, medium or low. That’s enough to get it on the list.
You can raise one from the Challenges page, from anywhere in the app with Quick Add, or from the thing that’s going wrong:
- On a metric that’s off target, Flag as challenge writes it up for you — the metric’s name, its current value against target, and the metric’s owner.
- On an action item that’s stuck, Create challenge raises one that stays linked to the action item.
Let the team decide what matters
Not every problem deserves meeting time. Each person can vote for the challenges they think matter most — one vote per person per challenge, and a second click takes it back. Votes are counted properly even when the whole team is voting at once during a sync, so the count you see is the real one.
Two controls keep the most urgent items in view:
- Escalate marks a challenge as serious and moves it to the top of the list, with a clear escalated badge.
- Pin to top keeps a challenge first, whatever else is going on.
Work it to a resolution
Open a challenge and you get everything in one panel: description, priority, votes, owner, notes, and how many days old it is. The age matters — a challenge that’s been open for 40 days is telling you something.
Solving a problem usually means somebody doing something. Add action items right from the challenge panel; each one goes onto the team’s action item list, where it’s reviewed with everything else. When the problem is gone, mark the challenge resolved. Resolved challenges drop out of the list (show them again whenever you need the history), and a challenge that comes back can be reopened.
The heart of the sync
Challenges are a full step in every sync — by default the longest one. The team sees the live list, votes, and works through it from the top. Because the list is sorted by what’s pinned, escalated and highest priority, the meeting starts on what matters instead of whatever was raised last.
See problems across teams
If other teams report to yours, the challenges page shows a card for each of them: how many challenges are open, how many are escalated, how many are high priority, and which ones need attention. A leadership team can spot a department that’s struggling without sitting in its meetings. Across a portfolio of client companies, open and escalated challenges also feed each company’s health in the advisor view.
The guide to solving challenges before they escalate covers how to run the discussion so problems actually get closed.