For or With?

The tension was there at the beginning

It would be easy to tell a story about performance analysis growing up.

First, analysts produced information for coaches. Then, as the profession became more sophisticated, they learned to work with coaches and athletes instead.

Clyde Street does not support that story.

In December 2010, Keith Lyons returned to a paper he had written in 1993. Its title was Working with Coaches and Performers: Notational Analysis as Liberational Praxis?

The language in that paper is strikingly contemporary. Keith described analyst relationships through words such as empowering, facilitating, sharing and learning. At their best, he wrote, the relationships between notational analysts and coaches or performers were collaborative and interdependent.

But the warning sat in the same paper.

At their worst, those relationships could resemble what Keith, drawing explicitly on Paulo Freire, called invasion: the imposition of values, beliefs and ways of seeing through an unequal relationship.

The two possibilities were not separated by twenty years of professional development. They were already beside one another in 1993.

That changes the question.

The interesting history is not a movement from for to with. It is the much less comfortable problem of what it takes for analytical expertise to become useful in a relationship — and what happens when the expertise begins to get in the way.

When analysis gets in the way

The 1993 paper was not an argument against expertise.

Keith was working with the Welsh Rugby Union and with Welsh women’s lacrosse. The purpose of the notational work was to give coaches, and through them players, augmented information about performance. Analysis was defined closely with the coaches concerned. Written accounts and video narratives sat inside relationships Keith described through conversation, chat and humour.

Sometimes the work helped. Keith recalled occasions when weeks or months of analysis produced information coaches found useful and occasionally allowed them to recast what they knew about performance.

Sometimes similar amounts of work did not help at all.

He was explicit about the failure condition. Detailed analysis could block action. Opponent analysis could disempower coaches and players and make decision-making less effective. There were occasions when his own analytical work became an academic exercise and the language of liberation became rhetoric rather than reality.

That is an unusually demanding starting point for thinking about service.

The analyst can have more information and still make the situation worse.

The work can be rigorous and still fail the practitioner.

A relationship can be described as collaborative and still contain unequal authority.

The problem is not solved by changing a preposition.

Care changes what can be shared

By 2013, Keith was approaching the same professional relationship through another question: what kind of responsibility comes with seeing things other people may not see?

In Performance Analysts, Vocation and Moral Agency, he looked back across thirty-five years of analytical practice and asked about the care we owe to others — including our own teams and our opponents.

This was not an abstract concern. Keith had spent much of his career looking closely at movement patterns, strengths, weaknesses and tactical possibilities. Such information could help one team and contribute to another person’s defeat. In high-performance sport, forensic insight has consequences.

Keith described his own ethical position as doing what he could to support optimal performance within fair play and mutual respect. The important move for this article is narrower than a complete ethics of performance analysis. It is his insistence that analysts have to make choices about what they share and how they share it.

Service therefore cannot be reduced to accuracy or volume.

The relationship includes responsibility for the consequences of communication.

The analyst is not outside the action simply because the work begins with observation or data.

Being around is not the same as understanding

In September 2016, Keith approached the relationship from the problem of outsiders and insiders.

He had been reading about Allan Roth in baseball and thinking again about Charles Reep in football. Both had insights they wanted to share with practitioners. Both also faced the problem of being taken seriously from outside the immediate world of the coach or manager.

Contemporary reflections from Rob Carroll and Oliver Gage sharpened the problem for Keith. Technical knowledge and qualifications did not automatically create a useful place inside practice.

Keith’s phrase was being around.

But being around was not the destination. He connected it to taking the role of the other: trying to understand the perspective from which another person acts, and recognising that professional roles are made and negotiated in interaction rather than simply announced by a job title.

He proposed a matrix for analyst development and hoped it would convey the entanglement of analysis and coaching.

The matrix need not become a competency model for us to notice the shift in emphasis.

The post did not describe analyst craft only through what the analyst could observe, record, code or calculate. It made the relationship itself part of what needed attention.

That still does not mean the analyst can know another person’s mind. Nor does proximity guarantee trust. A person can spend every day inside a training environment and remain poorly attuned to what coaches or athletes value.

What Keith was making visible was the work of orientation: learning enough about another person’s context for the message and the messenger to have a chance of meeting.

Who has to learn whose language?

A few weeks later, the direction of adaptation became more explicitly reciprocal.

Rob Carroll posed a question that caught Keith’s attention: should coaches learn to speak data as much as analysts learn to speak coach?

The question matters because it interrupts another easy service model.

If the analyst is always the translator and the coach is always the recipient, the relationship can remain one-way even when everyone is friendly and collaborative. The risk is that the analyst’s language still sets the terms of the exchange.

Keith did not resolve that problem with a formula. He returned instead to representation, narrative and story sharing. He imagined relationships in which people could extend one another’s proximal development and described this as an opportunity at the heart of learning organisations.

That is a proposition, not evidence that coach–analyst communication became symmetrical.

But it makes a useful change to the question.

Working with somebody may require more than learning how to explain your own expertise clearly. It may require allowing what counts as expertise, representation and useful communication to be changed by the other person too.

Service as co-production

By September 2017, Keith was using the word service directly.

He was thinking about how people were inducted into performance analysis and analytics, and about conversations concerning the augmentation of coaches’ and athletes’ sensory experiences. Theory of mind helped him think differently about those conversations.

His formulation was explicit: a performance analysis and analytics service is a co-production and requires sensitivity to others as well as to ourselves on a daily basis.

The surrounding post travels through theory of mind, scripts, memory, mental time travel and possible futures. Those intellectual sources belong to their authors, and the neurocognitive material does not prove that an analyst can reliably infer what another person is thinking.

For this route, its importance is relational.

In this post, Keith explicitly resisted describing technology as the essence of performance analysis. The most powerful relationships, he suggested, occurred in the context of coaches’ and athletes’ personal learning journeys.

Analysis was something offered as a service inside those journeys.

Co-production is a strong word, but it needs the same caution as with.

The source does not tell us that authority was equal or that coaches and athletes controlled what was collected, represented or circulated. Nor does the word tell us who controlled systems, categories, selection or training priorities in any particular setting.

It names a relational aspiration and a form of work. It does not certify how power was distributed.

Less is more

In January 2020, the problem arrived in a data-rich form.

Keith was responding to discussion of professional rugby and to research by Andrew Manley and Shaun Williams on emerging technologies, organisational surveillance and control. Their empirical findings belong to their study and their context. Keith’s response was to ask what those arguments meant for analytical practice when more and more data could be captured.

After his years in analysis, he offered two principles.

Less is more.

And: decide what is so important that it has to be shared.

This is a revealing place for the Clyde Street trail to arrive.

Keith’s late response here is not maximal information. It is not the dashboard with the most measures, the analyst with the greatest technical range or the system that sees everything.

It is judgement.

Keith made communication central to how analysts support coaches and players. He wanted analytical practice to be transformative rather than trapped in transactional processes of ubiquitous surveillance.

The language is different from 1993, but the underlying difficulty is recognisable. Analysis can enlarge another person’s capacity to act. It can also crowd that capacity out.

What has changed across the sources is not that Keith finally discovered collaboration. He began with collaboration already in view.

What accumulates is a more demanding description of what collaboration asks of the analyst: reflexivity about expertise, care about consequences, attention to context, perspective-taking, reciprocal communication, sensitivity, and sometimes restraint.

Clyde Street does not supply a clean answer to the title.

There are times when coaches and athletes genuinely need something produced for them. Expertise can save time, expose patterns that are hard to see from inside performance and provide forms of evidence that ordinary memory cannot supply.

There are also times when the analyst’s categories, volume, confidence or institutional power can become part of the problem.

“With” is therefore not the morally superior preposition that completes the history.

It is a question to keep asking of the relationship.

Who defined the problem?

Whose language organised the analysis?

What does the person receiving it need in order to judge and act?

What authority does the analyst hold over what is captured, selected and represented?

Question to carry

What should be shared — and what might be better left out?

The 1993 paper asked whether analysis could be liberational praxis while admitting that it could become invasive or obstruct action. The 2020 post asks, in a world of far greater analytical abundance, what is important enough to share.

The distance between those two sources is not a journey from for to with.

Across these sources, the recurring work is to ask what being with someone demands when you have expertise that can genuinely help them — and can genuinely get in their way.

Keith Lyons, “Working With Coaches And Performers” — 10/12/02; republishes the 1993 paper “Working with Coaches and Performers: Notational Analysis as Liberational Praxis?”

Keith Lyons, “Performance Analysts Vocation Moral Agency” — 13/12/05

Keith Lyons, “Performance analysis and taking the role of the other” — 16/09/27

Keith Lyons, “Conversations about informatics and performance analysis” — 16/11/16

Keith Lyons, “Theory of mind and mental time travel: all in a day’s work as a performance analyst” — 17/09/21

Keith Lyons, “What are we doing when we analyse?” — 20/01/10

Source and ownership note

“For or With?” is an editorial question, not the name of a Keith Lyons model and not a claim that performance analysis underwent one field-wide transition. Working With Coaches And Performers republishes a 1993 paper in which collaborative/interdependent practice and the danger of unequal expert “invasion” are already paired. Paulo Freire, Richard Tinning, Patti Lather, Linda Bain and other praxis sources retain their intellectual ownership. Max Weber, Norman Scotch, Albert Bandura and the moral-agency sources retain theirs. Allan Roth, Charles Reep, Rob Carroll, Oliver Gage and the role-taking/role-making sources retain their historical and intellectual contexts. Rob Carroll owns the initiating reciprocal-language question in Conversations about informatics and performance analysis; Donald Polkinghorne, Arthur Samuel and Nathan Kinch retain their source contributions. The theory-of-mind, memory and mental-time-travel researchers retain their empirical claims in Theory of mind and mental time travel: all in a day’s work as a performance analyst. Andrew Manley and Shaun Williams retain ownership of their professional-rugby surveillance findings in What are we doing when we analyse?. Keith owns his source-visible acts of applying, connecting and revising these materials in his thinking about performance-analysis practice and service.

This article does not claim that “with” establishes equality, that co-production produces good outcomes, that embedded analysts can know another person’s mind, that collaboration is always preferable to expert direction, that less information is always better, or that surveillance findings from one context describe the whole field.