Life-to-be-Owned: The Achievement Chain

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9 min readJan 9, 2022

Product, By-product, and Meta-product

The above diagram is part of the Life-as-Activity framework (v 0.3) which was published on Nov 29, 2020. In the past year, I quite often used this diagram for conversations with my friends and some frameworks.

Today I’d like to publish this piece as an independent work. There are two reasons behind this decision: 1) I need a link for sharing this diagram, and 2) I will develop the Life-as-Activity framework as a theoretical approach, so I will remove some non-activity theoretical aspects from the framework.

The Achievement Chain is inspired by the following theoretical resources:

The Activity System Model(Yrjö Engeström,1987): Subject — Outcome.
The evolving systems approach to the study of creative work (Howard E. Gruber, 1974,1989): By-product.
The constructive—developmental approach (Robert Kegan, 1982, 2009): The Evolving Self.

Thus, I will remove the Achievement Chain from the Life-as-Activity theoretical approach. But I will use it and other ideas to develop the Life-to-be-Owned framework as a practical framework that adopts the knowledge curation method to curate several practical perspectives together.

The Activity Systems model

The Temporal Activity Chains are based on Yrjö Engeström’s Activity Systems model which has a special diagram called “Engeström’s Triangle”.

Engeström’s triangle is based on the cultural-historical psychologists’ notions of mediation as individual action (subject — instruments — object) at the top of the diagram. Engeström (1987) considered “a human activity system always contains the subsystems of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.”(p.67), thus, he added the bottom of the triangle to the original individual triangle in order to include other people (community), social rules (rules), and the division of labor between the subject and others.

The above Engeström’s Activity Systems model is a collective version of activity theory and it was widely used in organizational learning and innovation, educational settings, HCI, and other domains. Activity Theorists didn’t apply the activity systems model to individual career or personal development. However, by adopting Paul Richard Kelly’s Temporal Activity Chains, we can develop a new framework for individual subjectivity analysis.

Life as Temporal Activity Chains

Based on the Activity System model — Engeström’s triangle — I discover five general life chains:

The Motivation Chain: the focus is “Subject-Object”.
The Achievement Chain: the focus is “Subject — Outcome”
The Productivity Chain: the focus is “Subject — Instrument”
The Competence Chain: the focus is “Subject — Division of labor”
The Communication Chain: the focus is “Subject — Community/Rules”

These life chains present five issues of subjectivity: Motivation, Achievement, Productivity, Competence, and Communication. In the context of the Activity System model, Motivation refers to the “Subject-Object” relationship, and Achievement refers to the “Subject — Outcome” relationship. Other three issues refer to three subsystems of the activity system: Productivity refers to the production subsystem, Competence refers to the Distribution subsystem, and Communication refers to the Exchange subsystem.

By adopting the Temporal Activity Chains schema, we can achieve the goal of visualizing “the Historically of Individuals” by discussing five issues of subjectivity.

The Subject—Outcome Relationship

The achievement chain focuses on the subject—outcome relationship. From the perspective of Life-as-Activity, the task is to identify individual achievement from the collective outcome. One useful way is to distinguish between three types of outcomes: product, by-product, and meta-product. The product refers to the intended outcome within the original object of activity and the by-product refers to the unintended outcome beyond the original object of activity. The meta-product refers to the self. This notion means the transformation of self as the outcome of temporal activity chains.

We have learned the concept of Activity Network. One way of forming an activity network is to turn the outcome into an object. In other words, one activity’s outcome can lead to a new activity by adopting the outcome of the old activity as the object of the new activity. I use “Reproduction of Activity” to describe the same phenomena. Both products and by-products can generate new activities.

Finally, the Life-as-Activity approach understands “Development” as an interactive process of “Reproduction of Activity” and “Transformation of Self”. The outcome of the activity generates product, by-product, and meta-product. Product and by-product generate new activity while meta-product contributes to the transformation of self which leads to better individual performance within the new collective activity.

By-product

By-product is a normal phenomenon for experienced individual workers and teams. In his study of Charles Darwin, Howard Gruber (1974) showed that even a great scientist embraces by-productive thinking in his creative work process.

Gruber said, “In his beautiful book Productive Thinking, Max Wertheimer, founder of Gestalt psychology, focused his attention on the kind of direct thinking that goes to the heart of the probiel under attack. In Darwin’s long and twisting path, however, there are several striking examples of important steps toward the theory of evolution through natural selection being taken as by-products of efforts that seemed to move in other directions…The theory of coral reefs was based on an extrapolation from what Darwin has learned about the formation of continental mountain chains; if mountains are up-raised, he reasoned, the adjacent sea bed must sink; from this slow subsidence of the sea bed, the coral-reef theory followed. That theory does not deal at all with organic evolution, but it does provide a formal model quite analogous to Darwin’s eventual theory. Darwin did not have a five-year plan to move through this important sequence of ideas. It evolved. The monad theory, itself short-lived in Darwin’s thought and not entirely original, led him to his branching model of evolution. This became a cornerstone of his thought.” (1974, p.112)

In contemporary knowledge work activities, there are many ways to generate by-products. Activity theorists also claim that the mediation of an activity can be transformed into an object of a new activity.

Purpose

Gruber also introduces another concept to explain how the individual maintains his sense of direction with the by-product effect: purpose.

According to Gruber, it refers to a person’s ability to imagine himself outside the perspective of the moment, to see each sub-task in its place as part of the larger task he has set himself. He said, “This abstract purposefulness and perspective, this standing outside, is an activity undertaken in quite a different spirit from that in which the creative person immerses himself, lose himself in the material of nature. To accomplish his great synthesis Darwin had to be able to alternate between these two attitudes. To see more deeply into nature, he needed the perceptual, intuitive direct contact with the material. To understand what he had seen, and to construct a theory that would do it new justice, he had to re-examine everything incessantly from the varied perspectives of his diverse enterprises.” (1974, p.113)

From the perspective of Life-as-Activity, the purpose is the key to holding the complex temporal activity chains over long periods of time.

The Transformation of Self

There are many theories of the transformation of self. For adult development, I’d like to adopt Robert Kegan’s “neo-Piagetian” approach: the constructive—developmental approach which attends to the development of the activity of meaning-constructing. Kegan considers “person” as an activity, not a thing. He said, “Like the idea of construction, the idea of development liberates us from a static view of phenomena. As the idea of construction directs us to the activity that underlies and generates the form or thingness of a phenomenon, so the idea of development directs us to the origins and processes by which the form came to be and by which it will pass into a new form. This shift — from entity to process, from static to dynamic, from dichotomous to dialectical — is a shift with H.K.Wells (1972) notices in the historical development of modes of scientific thought.” (1982, p.13)

In order to present his theory to various readers from different contexts, Kegan uses different terms to name his theoretical concepts. For example, in his 1982 book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, he used “evolutionary truces” and “self”. He identifies two universal psychological orientations in human experience: independence v.s. inclusion and claims the tension between these two orientations is the core of human mental development. Based on this notion, he developed a stage model called the “helix of evolutionary truces” and discovered five stages: Incorporative Self, Impulsive Self, Imperial Self, Interpersonal Self, Institutional Self, and Interindividual Self.

In a 2009 book, Kegan used “adult mental complexity”, “adult meaning systems”, and “mind”. He said, “There are qualitatively different, discernibly distinct levels (the “plateaus”); that is, the demarcations between levels of mental complexity are not arbitrary. Each level represents a quite different way of knowing the world…These three adult meaning systems — the socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind — make sense of the world, and operate within it, in profoundly different ways.” (2009, pp.15–16).

Source: Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey (Immunity to Change, 2009, p.16)

The terms Kegan used such as “self”, “mind”, “mental” and “knowing” don’t refer to thinking processes alone. Kegan pointed out this issue in a 1994 book, “I am referring to the person’s meaning-constructive or meaning-organizational capacities. I am referring to the selective, interpretive, executive, construing capacities that psychologists have historically associated with the ‘ego’ or the ‘self.’ I look at people as the active organizers of their experience. ‘organisms organize,’ the developmental psychologist William Perry once said; ‘and human organisms organize meaning.’ This kind of ‘knowing,’ this work of the mind, is not about ‘cognition’ alone, if what we mean by cognition is thinking divorced from feeling and social relating. It is about the organizing principle we bring to our thinking and our feelings and our relating to others and our relating to parts of ourselves.” (1994, p.29)

A Path of Developing Agency

We have learned that HCI researchers adopted Activity Theory as a post-cognition approach to HCI study. Thus. Kegan’s approach is similar to Activity Theory in rejecting the pure cognition approach. For Life-as-Activity, we can adopt the three plateaus in adult mental development and consider the activity as an environment. Thus, I add Socializing, Authoring, and Transforming as three keywords for referring to Kegan’s three plateaus.

Let’s look at the details of the person—environment relationship from Kegan’s approach (2009, p.17):

The socialized mind: We are shaped by the definitions and expectations of our personal environment.
The self-authoring mind: We are able to step back enough from the social environment to generate an internal “seat of judgment” or personal authority that evaluates and makes choices about external expectations.
The self-transforming mind: We can step back from and reflect on the limits of our own ideology or personal authority; see that any one system or self-organization is in some way partial or incomplete; be friendlier toward contradiction and opposites; seek to hold on to multiple systems rather than projecting all but one onto the other.

Activity Theorists consider contradictions as the source of the development of activity systems. By combining Kegan’s approach and Activity Theory with the Temporal Activity Chains framework, we can discover a path of developing individual agency with activities.

The stage of the socialized mind is embedded in activities: the person doesn’t have awareness of the status and contradictions of an activity system.
The stage of self-authoring mind embedded in activities: the person has his own judgment about the contradictions of an activity system. However, he only thinks about the issue from his position or role.
The stage of the self-transforming mind is embedded in activities: the person can make sense of the contradictions of an activity system from different perspectives and different positions. Further, he intends to work out a solution to solving the existing contradictions.

In terms of Activity Theory, a person at the stage of the self-transforming mind is qualified for surfacing contradictions and conflict and modeling a new activity system. In this way, the achievement of Life-as-Activity is both development of individuals and collective activity systems.

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