An idea from somewhere else suddenly seems relevant to a problem you are working on.
The connection is interesting precisely because you did not expect it.
But before you rely on it, a harder question appears:
What are you actually asking the borrowed idea to do?
In September 2010, Keith Lyons noticed a connection he was not entirely sure he should make.
He had been reading about the personalisation of the web: digital services increasingly organised around the individual user. A few days earlier, while driving to Canberra, he had listened to novelist William Boyd discussing Ordinary Thunderstorms, a novel in which a man loses many of the things through which modern identity is normally recognised.
The two subjects did not obviously belong together.
Keith could see a possible link between personalised digital life, narrative and identity. But in Narrative Engines and Personal Identity he introduced the connection cautiously:
“Without forcing the link too much.”
That hesitation matters.
Keith was interested in the connection, but he had not yet decided what status to give it. It might be worth pursuing without yet being evidence, explanation or method.
So he followed it.
Work by David Ventura and David Brogan on digital storytelling gave him another way to think about narrative: not only as something an author creates, but as something shaped through choices and constraints. From there he returned to questions already present in his own work about participation, personal learning, digital environments and social connection.
The connection had helped him see his own problem differently.
That still does not make it proof of anything.
And that is the problem this Clyde Street trail makes useful for us now:
When we borrow an idea from somewhere else, what are we actually asking it to do?
A morning full of connections
Clyde Street is full of moments when Keith encountered other people’s work.
One post from January 2013 makes the abundance particularly visible.
In 130111 PLN Finds, Keith moved through an early-morning personal learning network crowded with people, links and subjects. Martin Weller appeared around open scholarship and online identity. Doug Belshaw brought Open Badges into view. Will Richardson led towards Ron Berger and student learning. Keith encountered Andy Miah on social media and Howard Rheingold’s NetSmart. He followed research on bushfire vulnerability in Tasmania and reporting on concussion after the death of Junior Seau.
It would be easy to look at a post like this and admire the range.
But range does not tell us what status each connection deserves.
Ron Berger’s work sent Keith towards the Centre for Student Work and got him thinking about curation and professional development. The bushfire research drew his attention to what long-term data might reveal about patterns of behaviour. The Junior Seau story led into concussion guidance and implementation questions relevant to Australian football codes.
Other things remain simply worth noticing.
There is nothing inferior about that.
A researcher does not have to turn everything she reads into a finding. A teacher can save an idea because it might become useful later. An analyst can notice an analogy without immediately building it into an analysis.
Intellectual richness and intellectual consequence are not the same thing.
The important discipline is not to make every connection do the same job.
Finding something interesting can be reason enough to keep looking.
It is not automatically reason enough to use it as evidence.
That matters whenever information arrives faster than we can properly evaluate it. It matters in literature searches, professional networks and conference conversations. It matters even more when AI can generate apparently clever connections almost instantly.
The fact that two things can be connected is not yet a reason to rely on the connection.
A connection can remain unfinished
A 2011 Clyde Street post makes the point from another direction.
In Narrative Networks, Keith encountered a Radio National conversation involving memoirist Marieke Hardy, Tanveer Ahmed and Benjamin Law. The discussion includes a difficult problem: if you write about your own life, you inevitably write about other people. What rights do those people have over the way they are represented? Should they have a right of reply?
Keith followed Hardy’s work and a review by Danielle Binks.
The discussion then took him somewhere quite different: back to questions he remembered from Action Research in the 1980s about interview transcripts, participation and the relationship between researchers and the people represented in their research.
The memoir discussion had not given him a research method.
It had helped him see an old problem again.
That gives the connection a legitimate place in the inquiry: as a way of reopening the problem, not as evidence that settles it.
Later in the same post, another trail developed. Keith followed material about narrative influence and neuroscience. He imagined bringing people from very different conversations into the same room and wondered about the relationship between the “narrative networks” then occupying him and the “narrative engines” he had written about previously.
And then the connection remains unresolved.
We do not need to finish it for him.
Some connections are worth retaining because they keep a question open, not because they have settled it.
There is another reason this particular Clyde Street post matters.
It is a post about representing other people. We are also representing another person’s work here, and our interpretation cannot receive a reply from Keith.
That does not require us to abandon interpretation. It requires restraint about what we claim for it: stay close to what Keith wrote, make our own reading visible as a reading, and leave room for someone else to judge it differently.
The same discipline applies whenever we borrow ideas from someone else.
Using another person’s concept does not make it ours.
And using it productively does not mean we have used it correctly.
What can Mozart do for a performance analyst?
In Aural Triggers for a Language of Performance?, Keith turned to music and sound.
He had listened to Graham Abbott examine Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony in detail. He encountered sound recordist Chris Watson talking about listening and capturing sound. He heard Simon Rattle discussing the Berlin Philharmonic, its energy and its work with young people.
Keith brought these encounters towards questions about observing and understanding performance in sport.
It would be easy to ask too much of them.
Mozart does not provide a method for analysing an athlete. The Berlin Philharmonic does not prove how a sports team should work. Chris Watson’s approach to recording sound is not evidence about performance analysis.
But none of that makes the connections useless.
Their value here is in attention.
Listening becomes more noticeable as a skilled activity. Observation looks less like simply “watching what happened” and more like something shaped by what the observer has learned to notice.
Music and sound gave Keith another comparison through which to think about performance.
An analogy can sharpen attention without establishing an equivalence.
That is a useful distinction whenever we borrow language or models from somewhere else.
An analogy may help us notice something we had missed.
It does not automatically explain the thing we have noticed.
The question is not whether we are allowed to borrow.
It is how much weight we ask the borrowed idea to carry.
When the problem is already waiting
The clearest version of this problem appears near the end of the Clyde Street trail we are following.
On 14 October 2019, Keith wrote Player Insights Scientists.
The Football Association was advertising for a Player Insights Scientist and a Player Data Scientist. Keith worked through what these jobs required: player profiling, data aggregation, modelling, visualisation, predictive work, dashboards and communication with coaches and support staff. Both roles expected people to turn complex information into useful insights.
The technical demands are obvious.
But another problem sits underneath them.
What happens between having the data and helping another person understand what matters?
The next Clyde Street post, Our roots in stories, moves into territory that might initially seem remote from data science.
Keith began with sport being awash with data. He then turned towards story, oral history, ethnography and qualitative description as possible resources for thinking about how analysts communicate and make sense of what they observe.
Neil Lanham appeared both as an analyst and as an oral historian. Keith drew on work associated with Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson on oral history. Clifford Geertz entered through thick description. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann appeared through the sociology of knowledge. Other qualitative traditions entered later in the post.
Those ideas remain theirs.
Keith’s contribution was the connection he made between those traditions and a problem he saw in contemporary analysis.
The move is visible: he was asking whether data-rich analysis might leave something unsaid about communication, interpretation and meaning.
A reader is free to find that illuminating.
A reader is also free to think that parts of the transfer are strained, incomplete or unconvincing.
Both responses remain possible because citing an established field does not make a new use of it automatically sound.
That matters because use is not validation.
A concept from another discipline may help us notice something, supply useful language, reopen a question or contribute to an argument.
Those are different claims.
If an analogy helped you notice a pattern, say that.
If an idea prompted a useful question, say that.
If you want a borrowed idea to support an explanation or conclusion, more is required.
Do not claim more for the connection than it can actually carry.
That is a modest discipline, but a demanding one.
It is particularly easy to forget when the borrowed idea comes from an impressive scholar, an unfamiliar discipline or a system capable of producing fluent explanations on demand.
Authority can seem to travel with the idea before we have decided whether it should.
Keith’s Clyde Street posts do not give us a formula for making that judgement.
They give us something more useful: cases in which we can inspect it.
A novel reopens a question. A crowded learning network contains connections with different consequences. Memoir brings an old research problem back into view. Another connection remains unfinished. Music changes what becomes noticeable without becoming a sports methodology. Oral history and ethnography are brought towards a practical problem in data-rich analysis while remaining open to challenge.
None of those outcomes needs to be promoted into something else.
The issue is the status we give each connection and the claim we make for it.
That is why use is not validation.
It leaves room for curiosity without requiring curiosity to become evidence.
It leaves room for an analogy to remain an analogy.
It leaves room for an unresolved question to stay open.
And it leaves room for a reader to decide that a connection Keith found useful does not carry as far as he hoped.
That seems especially important now.
Ideas are easy to find. Connections are easy to generate. AI can produce plausible bridges between disciplines, concepts and problems almost without effort.
The difficult part is still ours.
Noticing the connection is only the beginning.
We still have to decide what we are entitled to claim for it.
The first question is not:
Is this connection clever?
It is closer to this:
Question to carry
What am I asking this borrowed idea to help me see — and am I claiming more for it than it can support?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Narrative Engines and Personal Identity” — 10/09/16
Keith Lyons, “130111 PLN Finds” — 13/01/12
Keith Lyons, “Narrative Networks” — 11/10/22
Keith Lyons, “Aural Triggers for a Language of Performance?” — 10/11/28
Keith Lyons, “Player Insights Scientists” — 19/10/14
Keith Lyons, “Our Roots in Stories” — 19/10/14