Someone sends you a paper.
A colleague mentions a person you have never come across.
A student asks a question you had not considered.
A coach points towards something your analysis has missed.
Most of those leads go nowhere.
But occasionally somebody points you somewhere that becomes part of what you investigate next.
When that happens, a surprisingly difficult question follows:
Who contributed what?
In September 2019, a friend sent Keith Lyons an article about Béla Guttmann.
Keith had watched Guttmann’s Benfica team play in the 1960s. But the story now arriving through his friend was new to him.
In Béla, Keith wrote:
“I did not know of Béla’s story until my friend’s alert.”
That gives us something unusually clear to inspect.
The friend supplied the alert and the Daily Mirror profile.
Keith then followed that lead.
He read further about Guttmann. He brought work by David Bolchover and Sarah Kemp into the post. He connected Guttmann with coaches already present in his own work, including Valerij Lobanovskyi and Graham Taylor, and began asking questions about coaching, talent and performance.
The friend supplied the lead. Keith did the subsequent looking, comparing and questioning.
Both contributions matter.
But they are not the same contribution.
That distinction travels well beyond Clyde Street. Whenever somebody gives us a source, objection, recommendation or question that becomes part of our next piece of work, there is a harder question worth noticing:
What did another person put in front of me, and what did I then do with it?
That does not tell us that the friend caused everything that followed. Perhaps Keith would eventually have encountered Guttmann another way. The Daily Mirror article mattered. Later reading mattered. Keith already had questions about coaching.
Clyde Street cannot separate those things for us.
What it can show is the route visible in this particular post.
That is more useful than asking simply:
Who influenced whom?
Not every person changes the route
A 2013 Clyde Street post gives that question an important boundary.
130111 PLN Finds is crowded with people and material.
Keith encountered Martin Weller on open scholarship, Doug Belshaw on Open Badges, Andy Miah, Howard Rheingold, research on bushfire vulnerability, reporting about Junior Seau and much else besides.
Their presence alone does not tell us that each person changed where Keith’s inquiry went.
But one local route is unusually explicit.
Keith wrote that:
“Will Richardson gave me a lead to Ron Berger’s Deeper Learning post”
before quoting Berger’s account of exemplary student work.
He then wrote:
“Ron led me to the Centre for Student Work and has prompted me to think about curation in a more detailed way.”
Keith went on to wonder whether this might inform other professional development.
The contributions can still be kept separate.
Will Richardson supplies the lead.
Ron Berger supplies his own work.
Keith owned the subsequent curation and professional-development question.
And the many other people in the same post do not automatically receive the same significance merely because Keith named or read them.
That is an important restraint.
A person appearing in your intellectual landscape is not the same thing as that person providing a visible route into what you investigate next.
When the route is messier
An earlier Clyde Street post shows why even a visible route should not be made too neat.
During CCK08 in 2008, Keith spent a week moving among blog posts, alerts, presentations and linked material.
In CCK08: Week 3 Networked, he encountered presentations associated with George Siemens, Barry Wellman and Stephen Downes. Keith wrote that their non-linearity:
“sent me off to contemplate”
connectors, Netville and the semantics of networks.
Other movements appear across the post.
Keith followed a post by Stephen and learned about griefers and trolls. Barry’s description of networks reminded him of earlier presentation technologies. After finding a Flickr image, Keith noticed participation south of the equator and wondered about the digital divide. While writing, he read about a “chemical equator” and ended the post with another question about networks, environment, biography and geography.
It would be convenient to say exactly what sent the inquiry in those directions.
The source does not let us.
Was it George Siemens as a person?
An idea in a presentation?
The presentation’s non-linear form?
The technology through which Keith encountered it?
A question about networks he was already carrying?
Those possibilities overlap.
That messiness is part of the evidence.
Another person can be part of the observable route without being the sole explanation for what follows.
We therefore do not need to allocate credit for every thought.
We need to distinguish what we can actually see.
Here, Keith explicitly recorded encountered material sending him towards further contemplation.
That is enough.
Sometimes contact remains contact
Clyde Street also gives us cases where another person’s work is clearly valued but no comparable onward movement is visible.
In Stephen Downes and Jeanette Winterson, Keith wrote warmly about a Downes presentation and an interview with Winterson. OLDaily was part of his daily routine; the ABC arts programme was becoming an important part of his week.
There is access, attention and appreciation.
The post does not show enough subsequent inquiry to claim redirection.
That matters because not every recommendation, relationship or repeated encounter needs to go somewhere.
A source can be interesting.
A person can matter.
A conversation can be memorable.
None of those facts requires us to invent an intellectual consequence.
Keeping both contributions visible
Imagine a coach looking at an analyst’s report and asking a question the analyst had not considered.
The analyst then does new work and reaches a conclusion the coach never proposed.
The coach contributed the question.
The analyst performed the subsequent analysis.
Writing the coach out would conceal part of how the inquiry moved.
Attributing the whole analysis to the coach would conceal the work that followed.
The same distinction is visible in Clyde Street.
The unnamed friend remains beside the Béla inquiry.
Will Richardson remains beside the route to Ron Berger.
Ron Berger’s work remains Berger’s.
Keith’s later curation question remains Keith’s.
Being pointed somewhere is not the same thing as doing the work that follows.
And doing the later work does not erase the person who helped open the route.
How much belongs to the encounter?
This is where the question gets harder.
In Béla, the friend provided a particularly clear route because Keith said the story was previously unknown to him.
Even there, we cannot say how much of the eventual direction belongs to the friend.
The friend supplied the alert.
The Daily Mirror profile supplied material.
Bolchover and Kemp supplied their own accounts.
Keith already knew Guttmann’s Benfica team and already had interests in coaching.
Keith then decided what to read, compare and ask.
The source cannot tell us what would have happened without the alert.
CCK08: Week 3 Networked makes the attribution problem even less tidy. Person, source, presentation form, technology and existing concerns remain tangled together.
That uncertainty is worth preserving.
We do not need to know who “caused” the eventual thought in order to give another person’s contribution its proper place.
The useful judgement lies between two errors:
do not erase the person who supplied the route;
and
do not attribute everything that followed to them.
But when somebody else’s alert, question, objection or recommendation does become part of the route into your next piece of work, it is worth noticing what actually happened.
Clyde Street leaves that judgement with us:
Question to carry
When someone points me somewhere new, what do I actually do with the lead — and where does their contribution end and mine begin?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Béla” — 19/09/28
Keith Lyons, “130111 PLN Finds” — 13/01/12
Keith Lyons, “CCK08: Week 3 Networked” — 08/09/24
Keith Lyons, “Stephen Downes and Jeanette Winterson” — 08/06/11