09/24/2026
Coaches rated themselves higher than the people in the room did. On every dimension measured.
That’s not a study about bad coaches. It’s a study about what happens to anyone’s judgement when they’re inside the thing they’re judging.
We do not have a shortage of confident claims about what goes on in a gym, a workshop or a conference hall. We have a shortage of measurement.
You cannot rate your own room.
Not a practice, not a workshop, not a keynote, not a conference.
Not because you are dishonest. Because you are inside it, running it, which is the worst possible vantage point for judging what it was like.
So we ask people afterward how it went, and we call that evidence. It is the weakest instrument we have, and most of sport and most of the events industry runs on it.
What would you do differently if you actually knew?
The fix is not a better survey.
It is one number you already have: how many came back.
Athletes. Delegates. Volunteers. Officials. Anyone who was in the room. Your registration system holds both lists. It takes an afternoon.
Ratings can be flattered. Attendance can be bought. Whether people chose to come back a second time cannot.
Most organizations have never calculated it. The ones that do are usually surprised.
All of this led to a book.
Our founder spent twenty years inside Canadian sport as a coach and an administrator, explaining every crisis separately the way everyone does. Then he checked the numbers behind his own explanations and none of them survived.
Pyramid Scheme argues that sport is not an industry with problems. It is a society, about 160 years old, and it is failing the way societies fail. The last third is the rebuild, including a thirteen-indicator scorecard any organization can run from records it already holds.
All driven by the measurement principles and tools we build here.
Out now in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook. The complete toolkit is free at justkenking.com/toolkit…no email required.
