In my last article, I made a bit of an unsubstantiated claim, that there aren’t enough human coaches to truly democratise coaching. One helpful comment (thank you!) questioned that point, which made me revisit my assumptions and I thought it would be helpful to work through the maths “in public”.
Before we dive into that, let’s make two important points.
Sustainability is important
Regardless of whether it’s logistically possible for every human being to receive human coaching, it’s important to acknowledge that paying for another person’s time simply doesn’t work at real scale over the longer term. If we’re talking about true democratisation, that means making coaching available to everybody regardless of income, so it needs to be affordable for those who earn the least.
The internet tells me that the average annual salary in Sudan, for example, is 439,000 Sudanese Pounds, equivalent to less than £600 (just over $700). I don’t need to compare that to the cost of even the cheapest coaching sessions. With a population of almost 50 million, the problem of price demands a solution if the democratisation of coaching is to become a reality.
Definitions are just as important
Many definitions for coaching presuppose the existence of a human coach. There’s talk about “partnering with clients” and even specific mention of a coach. This begs the question: If somebody did start to literally replace human coaches with a machine, would the coaching leave with the (human) coach?
For now, let’s park that. I’ve switched between using the word coaching to describe the process a machine would take someone through and being careful not to, and I’m not going to become draconian with myself now.
Rather than getting into a debate on it, let’s accept for the purpose of this article that a machine is at least offering a valuable facilitated self-reflective experience, which many (human) coaches, particularly those of the most non-directive nature, might say they provide for their clients anyway.
The maths is maybe the most important
On the scale question, a fair challenge is that not every single of the 8 billion humans alive actually need coaching. While philosophically I think coaching is helpful for everyone, there are many factors that might say somebody doesn’t need access to one. Let’s assume that only 1% of the population will benefit from coaching at all. I’ll come back to that number.
To provide coaching to only 80 million people around the world would need the provision of, let’s say, that number of coaching sessions every month, on average. Let’s add another assumption that the typical human coach has capacity for 20 sessions per week, or 80 or so per month. That’s far more sessions than any coach I know delivers, certainly not a number I’d consider sustainable, and I’d expect the quality to drop as a result, which feels like a bad byproduct. But it gives us a nice round number as a result: 1,000,000.
There are plenty of estimates out there about the size of the professional coaching population globally, and none come close to that number. If we’re valuing quality and sustainability, we’d probably want at least double that.
In other words…
Given current coach numbers, working at full capacity, we might be able to “democratise” coaching to the wealthiest 0.5% of the world’s population.
Call me an idealist, but that doesn’t feel particularly democratic to me. It feels like AI as an alternative is a genuinely attractive route to make coaching accessible.
In the meantime, I’d love for coaches to do three key things:
- Push into what makes us magical as humans. If we retain the highest levels of quality in our delivery, any rollout at scale of AI will be appropriately accompanied by human coaching.
- Support the development of AI coaching tools through engagement – if the end result of machine-enabled democratisation is a false assurance that people are receiving coaching when, in fact, they’re not, everybody involved will suffer.
- Remain aware and educated about technology developments, particularly in the coaching arena. Maybe consider joining the Coachtech Collective. This enables us to prepare in advance of adoption at scale, and equips us to evangelise and challenge as appropriate as coaching sponsors make decisions around their investments.
