The Uncoaching
Lab.

What if the ultimate measure of a coach is not how long clients stay but how much freedom, agency and collective capacity they gain without us?

59% of coaches expect revenue growth, mainly from more clients and sessions rather than higher fees.

The provocation: could coaching create value through greater client autonomy, not simply more sessions?.

Source: ICF · 2025 Global Coaching Study ↗

Proposed pilot

€1,495 excl. VAT / person

6 weeks · 5 live online experimental labs · 1 virtual showcase · Real-world prototype · 10–16 participants

Who this is for

Bold coaches, innovators, change-makers and practice founders ready to question the coaching business model itself, including the assumptions that more sessions, more experts and more self-improvement always create better outcomes.

The radical shift

From selling access to a coach to designing conditions in which people, teams and communities can develop their own capacity for reflection, decision-making and change.

Provocation

What if the problem is not the person? What if the most responsible intervention is to stop coaching, challenge the brief, redesign the environment or hand power back?

What you will experiment with

  • Identify situations where coaching unintentionally individualises systemic problems.

  • Challenge business incentives that reward dependency rather than autonomy.

  • Use design thinking, futures methods and provocative reframing to imagine alternatives.

  • Prototype peer-led learning, collective reflection, self-directed practices or systemic interventions.

  • Explore when AI supports autonomy and when it risks undermining privacy, judgement or human connection.

  • Design ethical, financially viable business models that reward outcomes, transfer of capability and appropriate endings.

  • LAB 01

    Kill the assumptions

    Interrogate the coaching industry’s sacred cows and invisible incentives.

  • LAB 02

    Find the real problem

    Follow the issue beyond the individual into systems, relationships and power.

  • LAB 03

    Imagine the uncoach

    Radical alternatives, speculative futures and reversal provocations.

  • LABS 04–05

    Prototype the impossible

    Design, test and revise an intervention that reduces dependency.

  • SHOWCASE

    Make it public

    Present a bold proposition, evidence and a responsible business model.

A radical scenario

A company offers every stressed employee six coaching sessions. But the source of stress is a chaotic shift rota and impossible workload. Your team refuses the usual brief. You co-design a transparent scheduling experiment and a peer-led feedback ritual, then measure whether employees gain agency and whether the structural stressor actually changes. The coach becomes a catalyst, not a permanent fixture.

How learning is demonstrated:

  • A prototype tested with relevant people, an honest account of failures and a measurable hypothesis about increased autonomy or reduced dependency.

    i would explore pathway 3