What Happened to 5.0?

Afterword

Keith worked with people.

He thought with sources.

He returned to old ideas with new problems.

Beyond the Breadcrumbs has tried to do something similar: to read with Clyde Street rather than stand above it.

For this final piece, we follow one of those relationships the other way — beyond the edge of Clyde Street.

In 2018, Keith Lyons wrote that he had been working with Tony Charge on an idea called qualitative analytics 5.0.

On 9 October 2018, Keith Lyons published a short post with an unusual title.

3.0, 4.0, 5.0.

The first number belonged to Stephen Downes’s new E-Learning 3.0 course. The second came from Keith’s encounter with Leadership 4.0 and the language of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Then came 5.0.

“I have been working with Tony Charge at Sports Wizard ® to develop an idea about qualitative analytics,” Keith wrote.

The next sentence changed pronoun.

“We have used the 5.0 number…”

That small word matters.

We.

Clyde Street is full of people whose work Keith read, followed, borrowed from, disagreed with and carried elsewhere. Tony enters this particular post differently. Keith describes something they are developing together.

He also immediately puts a brake on it.

The use of 5.0 is “ambitious”, he says. The number is useful because it opens a transparent conversation about the analysis and observation of performance. It is not presented as a validated historical stage, a settled taxonomy or proof that analytics has somehow arrived at its final version.

That combination — a collaborative “we” and an explicit limit — is a good place to begin.

Because 5.0 did not arrive from nowhere.

And it did not stop at the edge of Clyde Street.

Before 5.0

Two years earlier, Keith had described what he thought was happening to his own work as a qualitative turn.

The phrase appeared while he was reading Christopher Alexander, John Urry, Mimi Sheller and Jon Anderson and trying to find stronger epistemological and ontological foundations for the observation and analysis of performance.

It would be easy to read “qualitative turn” as a declaration against numbers.

Keith did not write it that way.

At the end of the same post, he hoped these new ideas would help him understand performance in a “qualitatively and quantitatively different way”.

The following day he was reading learning-analytics literature about augmented information and conducting what he called a re-view of qualitative approaches to analytics. Visualisation, heuristics, cognitive maps and analysis processes were all in the same working space.

The distinction kept refusing to behave like a clean divide.

In February 2017, Keith returned to Donald Polkinghorne’s narrative knowing and Philippe Mongin’s analytic narratives through a paper about humans and killer whales. The paper combined fragmentary historical evidence with a fuzzy model. Keith liked the qualitative possibilities of analytic narrative, but he explicitly kept quantitative modelling inside the frame.

His interest was not in choosing a winning side.

It was in asking what different forms of evidence and representation could contribute when people were trying to understand a complicated performance.

That matters for Tony’s later appearance.

Qualitative analytics 5.0 was not the moment Keith abandoned quantitative analysis and discovered something else.

The Clyde Street trail is much more entangled than that.

The 5.0 seam does not settle the old qualitative/quantitative question. It gives that question a concrete Tony-and-Keith junction.

Tony was already somewhere in the applied landscape

The public Sports Wizard record lets us see a little more of the setting, although not enough to reconstruct a private relationship.

By May 2014, Tony Charge was being identified publicly as Sports Wizard’s Managing Director. Later that year an archived Sports Wizard post listed Keith among a wider group of coaches, academics, IT specialists and players associated with the organisation.

That tells us Tony and Keith were publicly associated with the same applied performance environment before 2018.

It does not tell us when they first met, how closely they worked in every intervening year or who introduced which idea to whom.

The distinction matters because later accounts make the relationship sound much tidier than the contemporary evidence does.

What we can see in the earlier Sports Wizard material is a practical interest in qualitative indicators sitting alongside conventional statistics. Decision-making, transitions and momentum were being treated as things that might be observed, discussed and in some cases measured in real time.

By October 2018, Keith gave us something much firmer than organisational proximity.

He and Tony were working together on qualitative analytics.

And Keith put intelligence augmentation inside the description of what 5.0 might become.

Artificial or augmented?

That second distinction had been occupying him too.

In March 2018, six months before the Tony post, Keith went back to Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart.

He described intelligence augmentation as profoundly important when thinking about our relationship with artificial intelligence. What interested him was not a machine taking the human out of the loop. It was the possibility of increasing a person’s capability to understand complex situations and solve problems through combinations of artifacts, language, methods and training.

Keith brought that history into sport informatics and analytics.

His closing move was not to reject artificial intelligence. It was to imagine AI becoming part of human augmentation and transformed practice.

That is a useful distinction.

Artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation are not opposites in the way “human or machine” can make them sound.

At least in the route Keith was exploring, the question was what the computational capability was there to do — and what remained with the human being who had to notice, interpret, judge and act.

When 5.0 appeared in October, Keith and Tony placed their qualitative-analytics conversation inside that augmentation landscape.

A few months later, the connection was visible inside Sports Wizard itself. In April 2019, a Sports Wizard post about barriers to AI adoption said one of the organisation’s commitments was to find ways to integrate AI initiatives through “sensitive intelligence augmentation approaches”.

This does not prove that every sentence of Sports Wizard’s position belonged equally to Tony and Keith.

It does show that the AI : IA distinction was no longer confined to one Clyde Street reading journey. After their 5.0 collaboration, it had entered Sports Wizard’s applied organisational language.

The two colons

Read beside one another, the two distinctions begin to rhyme.

They are not the same problem.

Qualitative : quantitative is a question about forms of evidence, representation, description, interpretation and measurement.

AI : IA is a question about the relationship between computational capability and human capability.

But the sources make one parallel available. That parallel is ours to notice, not a framework Keith or Tony named.

In neither case did the useful move have to be replacement.

Keith’s qualitative turn did not require the quantitative to disappear. His analytic narratives could be qualitative and still provide a platform for quantitative models.

His interest in intelligence augmentation did not require AI to disappear either. AI could become one of the resources through which human capability was augmented.

The word between them was often not or.

It was with.

That does not turn the Tony–Keith collaboration into a philosophy with four neat boxes. Clyde Street gives us no warrant for that.

It does make the 5.0 post easier to understand.

The 2018 source places Keith and Tony inside an analytics conversation that did not begin and end with counting. Around it sit observation, context, behaviour, interpretation and decision-making, inside a world in which measurement and computation still mattered.

The Sports Wizard environment gave that question an applied setting.

In February 2019, Keith published a post on dwell time through Sports Wizard. He began with his own early-1980s measurements of ball-in-play time and then shifted into organisational language: “We have found dwell time to be an excellent way to talk about performance with our partners.”

The passage is revealing because counting time is still there.

So is conversation.

A numerical observation becomes material for thinking about flow, behavioural and psychological momentum, ownership of game time and qualitative understanding.

Again, neither side abolishes the other.

The question is what the observation enables people to see and discuss.

Keith kept worrying at the same human–machine boundary after that. In January 2020, in a late Clyde Street post about intelligence augmentation, he wrote that sport needed clarity about the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Data science, in his account, involved more than programming or analysis. It involved evidence, people and decisions.

He argued that sport would need to connect human intelligence with machine learning.

The 5.0 post therefore sits inside a longer Clyde Street movement.

But Tony gives that movement a different kind of visibility.

Here, Keith does not only say: here is something I am reading.

He says: here is something we are developing.

Then Clyde Street ends

Keith died in May 2020.

That creates a hard boundary in this story.

Anything said afterwards can help us understand what other people remembered, continued, institutionalised or changed.

It cannot be written backwards as evidence of what Keith privately intended in 2018.

Tony left a comment beneath Keith’s obituary. He remembered Keith as “inspirational, friendly, helpful, encouraging, knowledgeable, sharing, inclusive, inquisitive”. He also remembered something much less intellectual: Wednesday pizzas with their close sports network.

The comment is small, but it stops this becoming a story about two abstractions called qualitative analytics and intelligence augmentation.

There were people inside the work.

One of them is now gone.

The other carries on.

When the later accounts differ

The later GameChanger site now carries many of the older Sports Wizard posts alongside its later qualitative-analytics work.

The post-2020 material gives us more information about how the organisation came to narrate the Tony–Keith relationship.

It also gives us a warning.

The accounts do not line up perfectly.

In 2021, GameChanger’s “Our Story So Far” described more than a decade of research and development as led by Keith.

In March 2022, another GameChanger account described the R&D as led by Tony, with Keith as his mentor. A May 2022 page used slightly different language again: Tony led the work, guided by Keith.

ARPI, where Tony is President and Chairman, now describes his development of qualitative analytics 5.0 as mixed-mode intelligence under the banner of intelligence augmentation, with “initial guidance” from Keith.

Those later accounts use different language for the relationship. They may be describing different periods, different parts of the research programme or different meanings of leadership. The public record available here does not let us collapse them into one lineage.

The 2018 Clyde Street source is simpler.

Keith says he had been “working with Tony Charge … to develop an idea”.

Then he writes about what “we” had done.

That does not tell us who led every part of the wider programme.

It does tell us how Keith represented this particular piece of work at the time:

as something they were doing together.

What travelled beyond the post

The later record does show that the language did not disappear with Keith.

GameChanger now describes its performance intelligence as a mixed-mode blend of qualitative and quantitative concepts, approaches, programmes and models. Its qualitative-analytics material continues to emphasise observation, behaviour, decision support and human activity while explicitly discussing machine learning and intelligence augmentation.

The Keith Lyons Academy of Qualitative Analytics makes the connection even more visible. It describes itself as founded on Qualitative Analytics 5.0 and includes among its activities the study of relationships between human intelligence and artificial intelligence in order to explore intelligence augmentation for decision support.

Keith and Tony both remain on its list of Fellows. The Academy says it was subsequently named in Keith’s honour after his death.

Tony’s ARPI biography carries the same vocabulary into another domain. Qualitative analytics 5.0 appears there as mixed-mode intelligence under intelligence augmentation rather than as a sport-only idea. ARPI now also lists advanced research into the relationship between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation among its main areas of activity.

This is where the story leaves Clyde Street most decisively.

Not because the later organisations prove what the 2018 collaboration “really meant”.

They do not.

They show what happened afterwards.

A phrase that Keith had treated as ambitious and conversational became attached to programmes, methods, an academy and a cross-domain institutional vocabulary.

The people named in the story remained visible too.

That survival is worth noticing precisely because we do not need to turn it into an origin myth.

Perhaps the number is the least interesting part now.

There is no need to believe that analytics proceeds through clean historical stages ending triumphantly at 5.0. Keith did not ask us to believe that in the first place.

The more durable question sits underneath the label.

What do we lose when quantitative data are treated as the whole of analysis?

What do we lose when qualitative understanding is treated as something that cannot be disciplined, modelled or brought into conversation with measurement?

What do we lose when artificial intelligence is imagined only as a substitute for human capability?

Question to carry

And what becomes possible when the question changes from replacement to augmentation?

Tony and Keith do not give Clyde Street one final answer to those questions.

Keith’s 2018 account of their shared work gives us a junction.

Keith arrived there carrying a qualitative turn that had never entirely left the quantitative behind, and an intelligence-augmentation inquiry that was asking machines to contribute without making human judgement disappear.

Tony had already been publicly identified as Sports Wizard’s Managing Director; the organisation’s public material placed qualitative indicators alongside conventional statistics.

At that point, those paths were explicitly joined.

After Keith’s death, Tony and the organisations around him continued to use, develop and institutionalise some of the language. Their later accounts of who led and who guided do not always match, and that difference should remain visible.

The cleanest sentence is still the older one.

“I have been working with Tony Charge…”

Maybe the most useful thing 5.0 carried forward was not the number at all.

With.