Much of performance analysis begins with something that has already happened.
The game is over. The movement is complete. The decision has been made. Video, observation and data can help somebody see the past more clearly.
Across Clyde Street, Keith Lyons kept returning to another possibility:
Could evidence do more than point backwards?
Could it help somebody recognise, imagine or prepare for what might be possible next?
That question travelled under the word feedforward.
More than replay
Keith’s clearest Clyde Street starting point came in 2009, when he returned to Peter Dowrick’s work on video self-modelling. The research belonged to Dowrick and his collaborators. What caught Keith was the possibility that a learner might see themselves not simply as they had performed, but in relation to a successful performance they had not yet fully achieved.
That changed the temporal direction of the image.
Video could still help reconstruct what had happened. But it might also make a possible next performance available for inspection.
The distinction stayed with Keith.
By 2012, while working with the open #OAPS101 course, the question had moved beyond a particular video technique. Keith wondered whether performance analysts might share something of “the world as it might be”. Analysis could remain retrospective while also becoming part of another person’s learning.
The question was no longer only: What happened?
It was also: What might this information help somebody notice, understand or try next?
A word that changed rooms
The trail became less tidy as it travelled.
In 2016, Keith used feedforward while thinking about coach learning and about what he called pre-view rather than review. Evidence might still account for where somebody had been, but could it also become part of a formative conversation about where their learning might go?
That assessment problem has its own fuller home in From Review to Pre-view. There, ePortfolios, warrant, performances of understanding and formal judgement matter more than the history of the word feedforward itself.
Around the same time, Keith encountered Stephen Downes using “feeding forward” differently. Keith did not pretend the meanings were identical. He placed Downes’s use beside the self-modelling lineage associated with Dowrick and made the difference productive.
That is important because feedforward did not remain one stable concept with one owner.
Sometimes Dowrick’s work was explicitly present. Sometimes other literatures carried the immediate intellectual weight. Sometimes the word had become part of Keith’s own professional vocabulary.
The lineage and the later uses should therefore not be collapsed.
For the fuller human and intellectual provenance of that journey, follow A Possible Future in the Frame — the protected Peter Dowrick Person-Centred Case. It asks a different question from this trail: what happens when an idea remains available for decades, its source is still visible, and changed conditions repeatedly ask it to do new work?
From memory to possibility
By 2017, Keith was using feedforward while reconsidering the purpose of performance analysis itself.
Analysis had long helped augment memory. A coach or athlete could return to events that were too fast, dense or distant to remember accurately.
Keith asked whether the service could augment possible futures too.
He connected feedforward with a wider literature on mental time travel, episodic simulation and future-oriented decision making. The surrounding research did not all belong to Dowrick. Keith’s move was to bring these materials into a professional question: could evidence help people prepare to act, rather than merely help them reconstruct what had already happened?
The sources do not show that future-facing information always improved performance. They do not establish feedforward as a validated universal method. A future-facing design could fail just as a retrospective one could.
What survives is the direction of attention.
A verb for a changing profession
In 2019, Keith returned to four older verbs for performance analysis:
Observe.
Record.
Analyse.
Model.
He was writing in a very different environment from the one in which he had first encountered video self-modelling. Data science, connected practice and artificial intelligence were now part of the professional landscape.
His addition was short:
“I would add to this feedforward.”
By then the word was doing something close to professional work.
Observe what is happening.
Record what happened.
Analyse and model it.
Then ask what the evidence helps somebody do next.
That is a long way from an edited videotape.
The continuity is weaker than a doctrine and stronger than a recurring keyword.
Question to carry
Across these Clyde Street returns, feedforward did not settle into one definition. It moved through self-modelling, analyst education, open learning, coach development, assessment, mental simulation and changing professional language.
The most useful thing to carry is therefore not a formula.
It is the interruption feedforward kept making to retrospective practice:
Has the evidence finished its work once it has explained what happened?
Or might it also help somebody see, understand or do something next?
Follow the trail
Person-Centred Case — Peter Dowrick:
A Possible Future in the Frame — Peter Dowrick, feedforward and a long Clyde Street return
Primary Essay — assessment branch:
From Review to Pre-view — When assessment becomes part of learning
Learning Encounter:
Who Learns from the Analysis?
Ownership note
Peter Dowrick and his coauthors retain ownership of their self-modelling research and formulations. Stephen Downes and the other researchers Keith encountered retain ownership of theirs. This trail concerns Keith Lyons’ visible returns, connections, re-situations and professional questions. It does not claim that every later use of feedforward was caused by Dowrick, that the different meanings of feedforward were equivalent, or that future-facing information was demonstrated to improve learning or performance.
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Feedforward” — 09/06/28
Keith Lyons, “OAPS101 Enhancing Performance” — 12/11/13
Keith Lyons, “Connecting understanding, learning and performance pre-view” — 16/09/16
Keith Lyons, “On-going learning: seeing patterns, changing what we know” — 16/10/28
Keith Lyons, “Theory of mind and mental time travel: all in a day’s work as a performance analyst” — 17/09/21
Keith Lyons, “Describing What We Do” — 19/09/12