In August 2017, in Understanding, Keith Lyons read a post by Mark Upton about KPIs, classrooms and the amount of time people in sport could spend preparing analysis instead of designing what happened on the field.
It did something slightly odd.
It sent Keith backwards more than twenty years.
Mark’s post, together with Keith’s preparations for a conference in Dublin, took him back to work by David Perkins and Tina Blythe on Teaching for Understanding. Keith wrote that their work had engrossed him in the 1990s. Now it had become useful again because a contemporary problem had made an older question newly live.
That is an awkward thing to call influence.
Mark had not introduced Keith to Teaching for Understanding. He did not own the older work. And the Clyde Street post did not show Keith abandoning one position and adopting Mark’s.
Mark’s current work supplied one reason to return.
That movement appears often enough across the Mark trail to become worth following in its own right.
A question about technology could send Keith back to older arguments about learning. A fragment about sport systems could meet a month of coach conversations and reopen ideas about how knowledge is made. A pair of links about complexity could send him into somebody else’s work entirely. Later, new arguments about artificial intelligence and reduction could return him to Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 account of augmenting human intellect.
The person opening the door did not have to own what was behind it.
And Keith usually left the door-opener visible.
Before the questions started coming back
Mark Upton appears in Clyde Street before the pattern becomes obvious.
In April 2011, Keith was preparing to talk with undergraduate coaching students about communication, social media and the coach. Among the examples he wanted them to follow were Mark Upton and Robert Oatey’s work at teamsportcoaching.com. Keith described them as strong advocates of coach education and singled out Mark’s work with online video as an excellent example of using social media from a serious understanding of coaching.
That is not yet a relationship story.
It is an early public judgement: Keith thought the work was worth showing to learners.
By late 2012, the connection had become practical. Mark was one of the administrators helping to build the Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport open course. When the course went live, Keith described a relay across time zones: Mark and Keith in Australia, Darrell Cobner and Adam Cullinane in Cardiff, supporting a course Keith wanted to be open, non-linear, exploratory and a little messy.
The collaboration matters because of what came next.
On 4 January 2013, Mark commented on Connecting and Flipping and shared examples of his own practice. Keith used the exchange to think about personal learning networks, mutual learning, reciprocity and trust.
Then he made the relationship unusually explicit.
Mark, he wrote, was “an important part of my development as a learner”. Keith added: “I trust his judgement implicitly.”
It would be easy to turn those sentences into too much.
Trust is not the same thing as obedience. Nor does a statement of trust make every later Mark appearance consequential. The very post in which Keith made the statement is crowded with other people: Alison Seaman, Dori Digenti, Stephen Downes, Kent Anderson, David Hopkins and others all enter the day’s thinking.
That crowd is important.
Mark mattered inside that crowded source environment, not outside it.
The Mark sources rarely resolve into a line from one person to one idea. More often they show several encounters arriving together and becoming useful because Keith connected them to something already underway.
The strongest Mark sources keep that messiness intact.
A contemporary, not an origin
In September 2015, two Medium posts set Keith thinking about technology, data and coach learning.
One was Mark’s. The other was Audrey Watters’s.
Keith shared Mark’s concern about reducing performance to isolated coded behaviours and about using data to control people without enough attention to context. Audrey’s work opened a related question about digital identity, ownership and learner control. Keith explicitly thanked both for setting him off on the train of thought.
The source makes it difficult to crown a single cause.
That is exactly why it is useful.
A month later, the pattern becomes more distinctive. Keith read a new Mark post about “working out loud”. He wrote that he had known Mark for some time, was fascinated by his wide understanding of performance and especially valued the way Mark thought in public.
Then the current material sent him backwards.
Mark’s work, together with Sheila MacNeill’s writing about blogging, returned Keith to narrative ideas he had been exploring in 1998. Elliot Eisner and Donald Polkinghorne came back into view. What had once belonged to an earlier period of Keith’s work became part of a new discussion about blogging, public voice, story and learning.
The important word is returned.
Mark was not being installed as the origin of Keith’s interest in narrative. Clyde Street preserves the opposite. Keith already had an intellectual history here. The contemporary encounter made it available again.
That distinction becomes increasingly useful as the sources move on.
Old work in a different epistemic environment
In May 2017, a conference on complex systems in sport, an open Santa Fe Institute course and a Mark Upton post called Seeking the Edge of Chaos arrived within the same week.
Keith had been thinking about complexity too.
He compared the moment with his own first foray into complexity in 1996. The conference, the open course and Mark’s post were part of what Keith called “a different epistemic environment”. The underlying challenge remained: how could complexity be discussed in sport without becoming an abstract concept?
Mark was part of the changed environment.
He was not the whole environment.
Three months later, the relationship between old and new became richer. In Mechanisms and Machineries, Keith picked up another fragment in Mark’s discussion of sport systems. Keith called the discussion compelling and said Mark’s latest theme resonated powerfully with a month of conversations he had just had with coaches in England and Ireland.
Mark’s post juxtaposed mechanistic approaches with more organic ways of thinking about learning and development, drawing in Carol Black. Keith did not simply take that juxtaposition and stop there. He connected it to Karin Knorr Cetina’s work on epistemic cultures, to the idea of everywhen, to Nigel Redman’s coaching metaphor and to the conversations he had been having with coaches.
The post is valuable because it shows several ownerships at once.
Mark’s work remained Mark’s. Carol Black’s argument remained Carol Black’s. Knorr Cetina remained one of Keith’s intellectual guides. The coach conversations belonged to their own setting.
Keith’s contribution was the connection he made among them.
The same month produced the cleanest example in the whole case.
Mark wrote about KPIs, comparative coaching and classrooms. Keith was preparing for his own technology presentation in Dublin. The combination took him back to Perkins and Blythe and the Teaching for Understanding work that had engrossed him in the 1990s.
Nothing in that sequence requires us to say Mark gave Keith the idea of understanding.
He plainly did not.
The more interesting thing is that another person’s current work can make something already known newly available for use.
An old paper can become a present resource again because somebody else asks a question at the right moment.
Sometimes the route is only a route
Not every useful relationship needs to arrive as a major intellectual encounter.
Sometimes Mark simply shared a link.
After Keith spoke about open educational resources at the AUSPIN conference in 2016, Mark sent him something he thought might resonate. Keith followed the lead into another workshop and publicly thanked Mark for opening the route.
The destination did not become Mark’s work because Mark had supplied the link.
That small distinction becomes increasingly important later.
In December 2018, Mark shared two references that sent Keith into Complexity and Models. One led to John Launer’s discussion of complex adaptive systems. The other led to Joshua Epstein’s Why Model? Keith followed both into questions about interrelatedness, uncertainty, explicit assumptions, the freedom to doubt and what Epstein called “militant ignorance”.
It would be misleading to describe those ideas as Mark Upton’s.
Mark’s visible act was smaller and still consequential: he opened the route.
Keith’s visible act was to follow it, make connections and write publicly about what the new material allowed him to consider.
In April 2019, Augmenting, interacting, reflecting carried the same pattern further back in time.
Mark shared links to Dan McQuillan and Joi Ito. Those links helped prompt Keith to revisit Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 Augmenting Human Intellect. Ben Shneiderman and Stephen Downes also entered the post. Keith used the cluster to think about artificial intelligence, reduction, ethics, collective care and the taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding technical systems.
Again, the source refuses a simple chain of influence.
Mark opened two doors. Other people supplied arguments. Keith returned to older work. Several sources met inside one act of reflection.
That is closer to how these Mark sources actually move.
A name can matter because it takes the reader somewhere else.
The relationship survives that dispersal.
In January 2020, Following and Leading opened with two more links Mark had shared about leadership and care. Keith put them beside Jo Gibson’s work on followership and a paper on evolutionary approaches to leading and following. Here the ownership boundary is especially useful: Keith explicitly credited Jo with making it difficult for him to think about leadership without followership. Mark’s role in the post was adjacent. He had opened further material around the same problem.
A weaker article would try to make every one of these sources prove the same thing about Mark.
They do not.
Some show admiration. Some show collaboration. Some show trust. Some show resonance. Some show a current problem bringing old work back into view. Some show nothing more than a link that was worth following.
The continuity is not a doctrine.
It is a person who repeatedly remains visible somewhere near the next question.
What trust does not prove
The 2013 statement that Keith trusted Mark’s judgement implicitly is the kind of sentence that can distort an intellectual history if it is allowed to do too much work.
Clyde Street does not show Keith becoming Mark’s follower.
It does not show Mark originating Keith’s long-standing interests in narrative, complexity, learning, understanding, systems or technology.
It does not give us a sustained public disagreement sequence like the one preserved between Keith and Stephen Downes over curation. The absence of such a disagreement does not prove harmony. It simply means the surviving public record does not give us that particular test.
Nor does the record let us reconstruct a private friendship or correspondence in more detail than Keith made public.
What it does give us is more modest and, in some ways, more interesting.
Keith had publicly described that trust. Later, Mark’s work repeatedly mattered when it arrived.
But what happened next was still Keith’s work.
He returned to old books and papers. He juxtaposed Mark with other people. He carried questions into coach conversations. He prepared conference presentations. He followed links into unfamiliar domains. He sometimes found that the current source made an older one newly useful.
And he left the route visible.
That is not the same as saying the route determined the destination.
The value of being sent back
We often tell intellectual histories by looking for the moment a new idea entered.
Clyde Street suggests another possibility.
Sometimes the important encounter is not the first arrival of an idea at all.
Sometimes what matters is that somebody else’s work makes an old idea available again.
Sometimes the paper has been read before. The author is already known. The question has already had a life. But the conditions are different now: a new technology, a different group of coaches, a public conversation, a problem that did not previously exist.
Then somebody publishes a fragment, shares a link or asks a question.
The old work comes back differently.
Mark Upton occupies that position repeatedly in Clyde Street.
Not as the owner of Keith’s intellectual past.
Not as the person who settled Keith’s judgement.
Not as a convenient label for “influence”.
As a contemporary Keith had publicly said he trusted, whose current work repeatedly made another route worth walking again.
That leaves a useful question beyond this case.
Who in our own intellectual lives keeps sending us back to work we thought we had already met?
Question to carry
And when we return, do we leave their part in that return visible?
Source and ownership note
Mark Upton retains ownership of his posts, fragments and arguments; the writers reached through Mark’s links retain ownership of their work. Keith owns the returns, connections and present uses recorded in Clyde Street. Mark’s role as a trusted contemporary and recurring route does not make him the origin of Keith’s earlier intellectual resources or the sole cause of later changes.
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Communication, Social Media and the Coach” — 11/04/07
Keith Lyons, “Writing a SOOC” — 12/10/03
Keith Lyons, “Week 1 at #OAPS101” — 12/11/10
Keith Lyons, “Connecting and Flipping” — 13/01/04
Keith Lyons, “Richard, Mark, Darrell, Sheila, and Arvo” — 15/10/13
Keith Lyons, “Complex Systems in Sports” — 17/05/11
Keith Lyons, “Mechanisms and Machineries” — 17/08/03
Keith Lyons, “Understanding” — 17/08/22
Keith Lyons, “Complexity and Models” — 18/12/13
Keith Lyons, “Augmenting, interacting, reflecting” — 19/04/11
Keith Lyons, “Following and Leading” — 20/01/14