From Doing to Being — Beyond the Breadcrumbs

In February 2018, Hamish Jeacocke asked a room of aspiring performance analysts to imagine an uncomfortable future.

Suppose a company released a product that could capture performance automatically, code it, build the database and upload the result. Suppose it cost substantially less than employing a full-time analyst. Suppose, moreover, that it had been designed so that coaches could use it themselves.

What, then, was the analyst for?

Hamish's presentation did not finish by defending the tools analysts already knew how to use.

It moved somewhere else.

“From doing to being.”

And underneath:

“A move from tool skills to professional skills.”

That distinction provides an unexpectedly good place from which to look at Hamish's appearances in Clyde Street.

Keith Lyons had known him for more than a decade by then. They belonged to the same developing performance-analysis world. They presented together, shared professional concerns and, on at least one visible occasion, Hamish sent Keith towards something he considered worth following.

But Clyde Street does not give us a conventional story of influence.

Keith never wrote that Hamish had transformed the way he thought.

There is no declaration of intellectual debt comparable with some of the other relationships visible in Clyde Street.

What survives instead is quieter and perhaps more interesting.

Across nearly a decade, Hamish repeatedly appears where data, technology and coaching meet. Then, in 2018, he looks backwards towards work Keith had helped establish and forwards towards a profession in which technology might increasingly be able to perform the technical work itself.

The question becomes less:

What did Hamish teach Keith?

and more:

What happens when two longstanding colleagues find themselves trying to understand what their profession is becoming?

Data has to go somewhere

One of the earliest substantial appearances comes at the Australian Institute of Sport's National Elite Sports Council Forum in November 2009.

Michael Flynn and Hamish presented Finding the edge: a case study with Triathlon.

Keith's account carefully distinguishes their contributions.

Michael talked about his learning journey, planning, people and the search for an edge. Hamish supplied results data extending from 1997 to the present across the three triathlon disciplines and overall race performance. Michael then explored what those data might mean for technical and tactical developments.

That division matters.

It would be easy, looking backwards, to make Hamish an early spokesman for some grand philosophy of human-centred analysis.

The surviving source does not support that.

What it does show is something smaller: data entering a conversation because somebody is trying to understand performance.

The numbers are not the destination.

They are being put to work.

Another Hamish presentation from the same year survives less completely.

We know its title because, four years later, Darrell Cobner returned to it in an open letter published on Clyde Street:

The Educational Technologist — a link between coaching and technology.

Darrell remembered it as one of his main takeaways from the 2009 IACSS conference and called it a pivotal catalyst in his own thinking about performance analysis. Looking backwards in 2013, Darrell said the presentation had made the importance of people rather than technology increasingly apparent to him. He then developed his own account around people, process and product.

The ownership needs to remain exact.

The presentation belonged to Hamish.

The learning account belongs to Darrell.

The original presentation has not been recovered, so we cannot reconstruct Hamish's argument from Darrell's response to it.

But even with that limitation, something worth noticing remains.

The title itself positioned the educational technologist as a link between coaching and technology. Beyond that, the missing deck has to remain missing.

The colleague who sends an alert

Three years later the relationship becomes visible in a much smaller episode.

On 30 April 2012, Keith wrote Visualising Medal Predictions.

The post begins with Hamish.

Hamish had alerted Keith that Infostrada and Roambi were working together to make Olympic data available through mobile visualisations.

Keith followed the alert.

He wrote about the partnership, the Virtual Medal Table, previous Olympic data and the possibility of displaying this material on mobile devices.

There is no dramatic intellectual conversion here.

That is precisely why the source is useful.

Hamish notices something.

He sends it.

Keith decides it is worth following and makes it part of his own public exploration.

Hamish does not own what Keith subsequently writes.

Keith does not become the owner of Hamish's contribution simply because he writes about it.

The relationship is visible in the movement between them.

And the object moving between them is again situated at a familiar interface:

data becoming something somebody can see and use.

Returning to the same room

By February 2018, Keith and Hamish were presenting together again.

Keith described Hamish and Adam Hewitt as colleagues he had known for more than a decade. The setting was the Australian Catholic University's Graduate Certificate in Performance Analysis. Keith presented A Partial History of Performance Analysis. Adam and Hamish presented their own work. Keith later shared those presentations with their permission, describing Hamish, Adam and Mitch Mooney as colleagues and friends whom he held in the highest regard.

The recovered presentation makes visible something the Clyde Street snapshot did not preserve in detail.

Its fuller title is A National View of Performance Analysis.

Hamish organised it around the Australian system, the profession and its possible futures. When he reached the profession, he explicitly proposed to build from Keith's earlier discussions and noted the establishment of AIS Performance Analysis under Keith in 2002. From there he moved into the growth of the profession, emerging learning pathways and professional structures before asking what artificial intelligence and automation might mean for the work analysts performed.

That creates an unusual reversal.

In many person-centred stories we look for what Keith carried from somebody else.

Here Hamish was explicitly using part of Keith's earlier professional history as a starting point for his own account of the field's current state.

Hamish then looked ahead.

If technical processes could increasingly be automated, he asked what an exceptional analyst would still need to be.

His answer emphasised qualities such as data literacy, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, influence and breadth of perspective.

Then came the move:

from doing to being.

The formulation is powerful because it does not reject technical expertise.

It changes what technical expertise is allowed to mean.

If coding footage, managing data or operating a particular system defines the professional, then sufficiently capable technology threatens that definition of the role.

But if those activities are means through which somebody helps a coach, athlete or organisation understand performance, the question becomes different.

The machine taking over some of the doing does not automatically answer what the professional should become.

Keith was asking something alongside it

There is a tempting way to tell what happened next.

We should avoid it.

The next Clyde Street post after Keith shared the presentations was Price and Value as a Performance Analyst.

It would make a beautifully neat story if Hamish had presented From doing to being, Keith had heard it, and Keith had gone home transformed.

That is not what the evidence establishes.

Keith had already described his own contribution to the ACU day.

He had been talking with the students about internships, the appropriate valuation of their work, whether undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications needed to be mandatory, recognition of prior learning and what he called a time of profound change in the role of the performance analyst.

The following day he expanded the argument.

Price and Value as a Performance Analyst begins as what Keith called a fragment: an attempt to gather strands in a debate about valuing people rather than pricing them.

The post moves through low-paid professional roles, unpaid internships, graduate numbers and the possibility that young analysts were entering a transactional relationship with their own profession.

Keith asks whether a cohort might refuse that arrangement.

What if analysts asserted their value rather than accepting that passion for sport justified exploitation?

Then another problem enters.

Qualifications.

Keith describes a student who had entered the ACU course through recognition of prior learning despite not having an undergraduate degree. He worries about job descriptions that treat formal degrees as mandatory regardless of what an applicant can actually do.

Then he reaches accreditation.

Keith is careful not to argue against standards.

His objection is to confusing a pathway with the pathway.

His formulation is that accreditation and certification should be “a pathway not the pathway.”

Within that section is a particularly intriguing person.

Keith describes a colleague with twenty years of experience analysing performance in a national sporting organisation who would not satisfy the formal criteria he was discussing, despite being regarded as an example of better professional practice.

It is tempting to make that colleague Hamish.

The surrounding circumstances make the possibility attractive.

But the source does not name him.

So neither can this article.

The person remains unidentified.

That gap is not an inconvenience to be solved by narrative.

It is part of what the evidence permits us to know.

Two questions occupying the same professional space

Once that boundary is kept, something better than the neat influence story becomes visible.

Hamish and Keith were not necessarily moving in sequence.

They were moving alongside one another.

Hamish was asking what happened to the analyst when technology could perform more of the technical work.

Keith was asking what happened to the analyst when employers, qualifications, accreditation systems and occupational practices failed to recognise the value of the person doing the work.

Hamish's route led from technological automation towards professional capability.

Keith's route led from the price of labour towards human and professional value.

Neither route belongs to the other.

But they occupy strikingly adjacent territory.

And this was not an abstract collision between two published arguments discovered years apart.

The two men were in the same learning environment on the same day after knowing one another for more than a decade. Keith preserved Hamish's presentation as part of the archive of that day. Hamish's own account used Keith's earlier professional activity as one of the points from which to consider what had happened to performance analysis since.

The source does not establish mentorship or a one-way influence chain.

It may be better understood as professional companionship across a changing field.

Sometimes one colleague alerts the other to something.

Sometimes their work appears in the same room.

Sometimes one colleague's earlier contribution has become part of the history from which the other now looks forward.

And sometimes both are trying, in their own language, to understand what should survive when familiar structures of work begin to change.

What the archive does not give us

There are important absences in this story.

Keith never says Hamish changed the way he thought about performance analysis.

The original 2009 Educational Technologist presentation has not been recovered, so Darrell's later response cannot be treated as a transcript of Hamish's argument.

Darrell's description of the presentation as pivotal belongs to Darrell.

The unnamed national-sport colleague in Price and Value cannot be assigned to Hamish.

And the proximity between A National View and Price and Value does not establish that one caused the other.

Those limitations stop the case becoming tidier than the relationship itself.

They also reveal what kind of relationship Clyde Street actually preserves.

Not every intellectually important colleague leaves behind a sentence saying:

This person changed me.

Sometimes what survives is a repeated professional proximity in which ideas, alerts, histories and questions cross.

That is weaker evidence for influence.

But it may be better evidence for companionship.

From tool skills to professional skills

There is a final reason Hamish's 2018 formulation deserves to remain attached to him.

Performance analysis had always contained technology.

The 2009 triathlon post contains data.

The missing Educational Technologist presentation put technology into its title.

The 2012 alert concerned mobile visualisation.

By 2018 Hamish was discussing artificial intelligence and automation.

Technology did not suddenly arrive at the end of this story.

By 2018, the question Hamish put to the profession had become sharper. If automation could absorb more of the technical work, what would distinguish the analyst?

His answer moved beyond tool operation towards data literacy, critical judgement, problem solving, communication, influence and breadth of perspective. He then turned those capabilities back towards practical questions about performance and what coaches expected analysis to contribute.

That does not make the earlier 2009 and 2012 episodes stages on a road towards the 2018 formulation. The sources do not establish that development. They show something narrower: technology and data had long been part of the professional territory in which Hamish and Keith encountered one another.

Hamish's move from tool skills to professional skills was one presentation, at one moment, addressing a profession he believed was changing.

Beside him, Keith was asking whether the profession knew how to value the people entering it at all.

Perhaps that is where the two trails meet.

Not in a claim that Hamish gave Keith an answer.

Not in a claim that Keith produced Hamish's view.

But in a professional relationship long enough for each man's work to remain visible around the other's—and in overlapping questions about what the profession should value as its tools and structures changed.