Against the Dashboard

The dashboard is always the same. Sessions completed. Attendance rate. A satisfaction score in the high fours. A sentiment line that trends gently upward, because sentiment lines always trend gently upward.

None of these are outcomes. They are proxies for effort, and they were chosen because they are the things a platform can observe without asking anyone a hard question.

This would be harmless if measurement were passive. It is not. A coach whose renewal depends on an attendance rate will chase attendance. A coach whose dashboard shows sentiment will, without ever deciding to, steer sessions somewhere pleasant. Nobody has to be cynical for this to happen; the metric just quietly becomes the job.

What would be worth measuring

The honest answer is that it is expensive. Did this person do the thing they said they wanted to do? Are they still in the role, or did they leave well? Would they hire this coach again in two years, when the glow has gone?

Those require following up long after the engagement has closed and the invoice has cleared, which is precisely why no platform does it. There is no dashboard tile for a question you can only answer in eighteen months.

A smaller proposal

Stop shipping the composite score. If a platform cannot measure outcomes, it should show the raw facts — sessions held, notes written, what the client stated as their goal at intake and what they said about it at close — and leave the interpretation to the two people in the room.

A blank space where a number should be is uncomfortable. It is considerably better than a confident number measuring the wrong thing.