Life Discovery: The “Present — Future” Fit and The ECHO Way
Is a Life Discovery Activity a Project? Yes!
A Life Discovery Activity is a Project. In the last section of The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0), I discussed Life Discovery from the perspective of Activity Theory.
From the perspective of Activity Theory, a toolkit is a Mediating Instrument of an Activity.
- The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) is a Mediating Instrument.
- What’s the Activity? It is the Life Discovery Activity.
What’s the Life Discovery Activity? Based on my book Project-oriented Activity Theory, I developed a toolkit called Project Engagement for Activity Theory. The Project Engagement Approach adopts two major theoretical approaches of Activity Theory for the toolkit. See the above diagram.
- The Activity System Model (Yrjö Engeström, 1987)
- Activity as Formation of Concept (Andy Blunden, 2010, 2012, 2014)
While Engeström’s model is perfect for dealing with traditional work projects, Blunden’s approach considers collaborative projects as the foundation of social movements and cultural innovation.
By curating the above two approaches together, the Project Engagement approach offers a cross-boundary solution for achieving balance between individual impact and collective impact. In this way, the approach could lead us to an innovative way of connecting personal life themes and cultural themes in order to build a sustainable society together.
What does it mean for the Life Discovery Activity?
- From the perspective of the Activity System model, the Life Discovery Activity focuses on Detecting Potential Contradictions within a person’s life activities.
- From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, the Life Discovery Activity focuses on Exploring Potential Themes within a person’s life activities.
So, there are two goals for a Life Discovery Activity. How can we do it successfully?
Today, I’d like to introduce the ECHO Way as a solution for the Life Discovery Activity.
1. A Story of Personal Innovation
I used my own experiences for nine modules of the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0). If we put these examples together, we see a story of personal innovation.
The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1) has nine modules. The above diagram is an example of the first module: Life Aspiration Orientation.
What should I do with my life?
The Life Aspiration Orientation module aims to answer the above difficult question and leads to a conversation for life discovery with the following three dimensions of impact:
- Epistemic Impact (Knowledge Heroes)
- Market Impact (Business Heroes)
- Social Impact (Social Change Heroes)
The toolkit is not for discussing traditional career development, but the life as a meaningful whole. We care about the real impact you can make. You can make an impact through paid jobs or other activities. These three dimensions don’t mean there are only three choices. It just highlights the directions of a free space. You can find a dot on the space and move around since life is a continuous flow.
You can also use it for long-term biographical reflection. For example, the above diagram is my own story.
1.1 Market Impact: Before 2008
The first stage of my career (1994–2001) was about advertising, marketing, and communication.
From 2001 to 2007, I worked for several private investors who were active in investing in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Following first-round investments, I helped start-ups raise successive rounds of funds from venture capital firms and then raised funds from public markets through IPOs.
1.2 Social Impact: 2004–2014
I spent most of my spare time on non-profit online communities for social learning, open education, free culture, etc. I used the theme of Nomad of Community to highlight the constancy of my activities of community building because I always joined a community or started a community.
1.3 Epistemic Impact: After 2014
I started learning Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and other theories around 2014. In 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity and developed a theory about general curation. In 2020, I started the Knowledge Curation project which aims to connect Theory and Practice.
The picture below lists what I wrote and what I designed. During 2018 to 2021, I wrote 10 quasi-theoretical books-in-draft. These books are outcomes of intellectual engagement with three theories: Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and Curativity Theory. Ecological Psychology is about environments and opportunities. Activity Theory is about activity and practice. Curativity Theory is about order and meaning through the transformation between pieces and whole.
I also designed a series of meta-diagrams and developed a theory about diagrams and diagramming. My work experience covers designing and writing. I can switch between verbal thinking and visual thinking. I like to develop brand-new abstract concepts and design brand-new concrete diagrams. I can switch between high-level strategic ideas and pixel-level interface design.
Knowledge frameworks are formed with concepts and diagrams. Eventually, I move to the direction of Knowledge Curation and consider Knowledge frameworks as my creative products.
1.4 Personal Innovation
On May 25, 2021, I shared my story in the article Personal Innovation as Career-fit with the Career-fit framework. You can find more details in the original article. The diagram below is an example of the Career-fit framework.
There are many ways to achieve personal innovation. One way is reflecting on your career experience. I created the above diagram for my own personal innovation.
I use Career-fit to name this new framework. The Career-fit framework has four keywords: Experience > Themes > Projects > Opportunities. It roughly suggests the following five steps for personal innovation:
- Reflect on career experience
- Discover pairs of opposite themes
- Fit all pairs of opposite themes
- Join or initiate relevant projects
- Fit career themes with career opportunities
The above diagram shows three Pairs of Opposite Themes of my career experience.
- China v.s. America
- Theory v.s. Practice
- Concept v.s. Diagram
If you read my previous articles, you probably know a term called Themes of Practice. The term refers to a bridge between individual life themes and collective cultural themes. Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical “themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life themes.” If we adopt it for discussing career development and personal innovation, we can consider Career Themes as a special type of Life Themes and Cultural Themes too.
The core of the Career-fit framework is the Structure and Dynamics of career themes. The idea of Pairs of Opposite Themes refers to significant differences between career themes. The idea of Meta-themes refers to using one high-level theme to curate similar career themes. The idea of the Development of Themes refers to the transformation of career themes.
If we want to explore personal innovation, the great starting point is Pairs of Opposite Themes because they could lead to Structural Tensions such as boundary, distance, difference, heterogeneity, contradiction, and complementation. If we can turn one or more structural tensions into creative opportunities, then we could find a way of personal innovation.
2. The ECHO Way
The above U-shaped diagram is part of the ECHO Way (V2.0) which is a practical framework for Knowledge Curation and Boundary Innovation.
- The ECHO Way (v1.0): It is only about Knowledge Curation.
- The ECHO Way (v2.0): It expanded to Boundary Innovation.
We can consider Life Discovery as Boundary Innovation because it is about a dialogue between the Present and the Future.
The ECHO way is defined as a practical framework for guiding research, design, and development in the real-life world. As a knowledge framework, it has three components: diagrams, concepts, and methods.
The core of the ECHO way is the following diagram.
- Theme U
- Project I
- Container Z
The Theme U diagram presents six themes in a U shape. I have been using the diagram many times since June 2020. Theme U is not only about six themes but about representing complex thematic relationships with spatial mediation. For example, I used the following diagram to explain Pairs of Opposite Themes with the Theme U diagram.
The Project I diagram is inspired by the Developmental Project Model. I changed the shape and layout in order to make a Diagram Blending which can be used for curating two or more frameworks together.
This means the ECHO Way is not a primary framework since it connects to other frameworks. You can find more details about the Developmental Project Model in this article.
The Container Z is inspired by the following meta-diagram. The ECHO Way is about fit between two sides. Where is the fit? It happens at the “Echozone” which is the third container of the following model.
The Container Z is also called Echozone.
You can find more details from the original article: The ECHO Way (v2.0).
3. Life Discovery: The “Present — Future” Fit
Life Discovery is a “cross-the-gap” activity that aims to explore a new place in a certain direction. There is a spatial distance between the existing place where we are and the expected place where we want to be.
We can consider Life Discovery as Boundary Innovation because it is about a dialogue between the Present (the existing place) and the Future (the expected place).
Now, let’s apply the ECHO Way (v2.0) to the “Present — Future” fit for the Life Discovery Activity. We can roughly use three phases for this process:
- Life U: Think with the Theme U diagram.
- Project I: Act with the Developmental Project model.
- Echo Z: Reach the end of the journey: an expected place.
The rest of the article will unpack these three phases.
4. Life U: Reflect on Life Themes
There are many ways to apply Theme U to the Life Discovery Activity. You can discover themes from your career experience as many as you can with the following three steps:
- listing major career events
- sorting them into several groups
- naming these groups
These names are themes of your career. You can also add keywords to these groups. These keywords are your life themes too.
A simple way of career reflection is just listing your major career events and writing notes while rethinking these events. A more advanced way of career reflection is using some tools and methods. For example, you can use a list of keywords or questions as triggers to help you go through your career.
Then, you can curate these themes into Pairs of Opposite Themes. If you are not familiar with thematic analysis, you can start by making a simple list of list themes.
Finally, you can pick the most important Three Pairs of Themes and place them on the Theme U diagram. There are many ways to curate your life themes into pairs of themes. For example, you can use some dimensions to guide the process of finding pairs of opposite themes from the list of career themes.
The above diagram is an abstract version diagram of the Career-fit framework. You can use three dimensions to organize your Pairs of Opposite Themes. For each dimension, you can select two themes that form a pair. For example, Theme A1 and Theme A2 are a pair of opposite themes that share Dimension A.
If we return to my case, then we can see the above examples of dimensions:
- Dimension A: Cross-cultural Work & Life
- Dimension B: Cross-discipline knowledge
- Dimension C: Cross-domain cognition
You don’t have to use these examples of dimensions since you have your unique career experience.
In addition to dimensions, the U diagram also uses the Left Field and Right Field to group themes.
By combining dimensions and fields, you can make a configuration of your career themes with the U diagram. The diagram below shows some examples of dimensions and fields. You can define your own dimensions and fields too.
I want to point out a small trick. Please pay attention to the top dimensions: Theme A1 and Theme A2. Don’t place important themes at the dimension. For the Career-fit framework, the top dimension themes are considered as background. You can find the reason in the following sections.
The above diagram uses “Past” and “Present” to name “Left Field” and “Right Field”. It is just an example of the general Theme U diagram. For Life U, we can use it without placing “Future” on the diagram. However, we can discuss about “Future” with the “Past — Present” diagram.
For Life U, you can use “Present” and “Future” to name “Left Field” and “Right Field”. However, this leads to the notion of “Possible Themes” for “Future”.
The above discussion suggests that we can generate themes from the Past. How can we generate “Possible Themes” for the Future? We can adopt the Possible Selves theory for this particular strategy.
5. Life U: Possible Themes
The Possible Selves theory was developed by Hazel Rose Markus in 1986.
You can imagine some future life situations and write themes for these events. I call these types of themes Possible Themes. A trick for discovering possible themes is to reflect on your Significant Others’ life themes.
If you can’t imagine your future, you can find “Like-to-be Selves” and “Like-to-avoid selves” from your Significant Others’ life events because their lives are real and you don’t have to imagine.
Significant Others refer to your family members, friends, teachers, classmates, bosses, colleagues, mentors, “symbolic mentors”, etc.
I learned the term “symbolic mentor” from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book The Systems Model of Creativity. Csikszentmihalyi pointed out, “Levinson (1978) also noted the complexity and variation inherent in mentoring relationships in general. They are not, as he said, ‘simple or an all-or-none matter’ (p.100). Rather, they may be only partially beneficial to a young person or seriously flawed and destructive, depending on the motives, capabilities, and disposition of the mentor (and of the apprentice). It is also possible for a mentoring relationship to be very limited and yet highly valuable to a young person’s development. For example, some people have purely symbolic mentors whom they have never met, such as an inspiring figure from the past, but who nonetheless may have taught them a great deal about the nature and standards of a domain of interest.” (2014, p.209)
For knowledge creators or other types of creators, “Symbolic Mentors” can be important Significant Others because they maybe can’t find “Knowledge Heroes” in their real life.
So, it is great to read biographies of your symbolic mentors for discovering possible themes for your life discovery activities. You can reflect on your symbolic mentors’ life events and find significant themes behind these events.
Moreover, you can find possible themes from fiction books, films, TV shows, and even news. All types of stories are the source of possible themes.
By using these stories to discover possible themes, you can imagine your possible selves on both the abstract level and the concrete level.
Moreover, I’d like to recommend Herminia Ibarra’s 2004 book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Ibarra adopts the Possible Selves theory to study career change. You can find more details about Possible Selves in the book.
6. Project I
As mentioned above, the “Present — Future” fit is designed as three phases:
- Life U: Think with the Theme U diagram.
- Project I: Act with the Developmental Project model.
- Echo Z: Reach the end of the journey: an expected place.
This three-phase structure emphasizes “Think — Act — Reach” actions. The second type of action is designed with the Project I diagram. For example, the diagram below is called HERO U which is a framework for a single theory knowledge curation project.
The HERO U framework has two parts:
- Theme U: it displays six types of “objectives of knowing” about one theory in a U theme.
- Project I: it designs a knowledge curation project around one theory.
I used the framework to guide the Activity U project in 2020. From August 2020 to March 2021, I wrote the following three books in draft. This was an amazing experience!
The seven red dots of the HERO U frameworks are “Personal Conditions of Knowing” for a knowledge curation project.
- The first group is Domain, Resource, and Tools, they define the outside setting of the knowing activity.
- The second group is Method and Problem, they define the source of competence and solution.
- The third group is Diagram and Concept, which define the format of the outcome of knowing.
These three groups form a process of knowing. I also developed a canvas which is for working with these “Personal Conditions of Knowing”. The below canvas is an example of the canvas. I used it to write a long article about the Activity System model which is an important theoretical approach of Activity Theory.
I also used the same canvas to guide my work on two books: Project-oriented Activity Theory and Platform for Development.
If your projects are not about knowledge curation, you don’t have to use the HERO U framework and its canvas. However, you can design your own project model and related tools for your activities.
7. The Developmental Project Model
The Developmental Project model is an abstract framework, you can adopt it to design a real developmental project for your Life Discovery Activities.
The above picture is the standard diagram of the Developmental Project Model. It uses eight elements to describe a developmental project:
- Purpose: Why do you want to initiate or join the project?
- Position: What’s the social structure of the project?
- Program: Does the project have formal organizational processes?
- Social: How do you connect with others due to joining the project?
- Content: How do you acquire new information and knowledge due to joining the project?
- Action: What actually do you do due to joining the project?
- Theme: Do you find some new and interesting themes for your career development?
- Identity: How do you perceive your identity before and after joining the project?
If we turn these elements into Project I and combine them with Life U, then we get the Career-fit diagram.
The final diagram can be considered as “an ecological approach” of career development because it refers to the structure of “organism (personal themes of career) — action (fitting) — environment(impact projects)”.
The eight elements of Project I form three groups as a process of transformation.
- The first group is defined as Situational Context which highlights three important aspects of Developmental Projects: Purpose, Position, and Program.
- The second group is defined as Developmental Resources which highlights three types of potential opportunities for Developmental Projects: Social, Content, and Action.
- The third group is defined as Impact by Projects which considers personal development caused by joining Developmental Projects from two dimensions: Theme and Identity.
I started the Activity U project in August 2020. The diagram below uses the Developmental Project Model to reflect on my experience of the project.
The Developmental Project Model is an abstract model, you can adopt it to guide your projects. However, if you have your own structure for Project I, you don’t have to follow the above model.
You can compare the HERO U framework with the Career-fit framework.
- HERO U: Project I has seven elements.
- Career-fit: Project I has eight elements.
For the Life Discovery Activity, you can use both frameworks for your Project I, or you can design your own version of Project I.
8. Echo Z
The core of the Life Discovery Activity is the “Present — Future” fit which is designed as three phases:
- Life U: Think with the Theme U diagram.
- Project I: Act with the Developmental Project model.
- Echo Z: Reach the end of the journey: an expected place.
This three-phase structure emphasizes “Think — Act — Reach” actions. The last phase is the most important phase for the whole journey of Life Discovery.
Let’s look at the Echozone of the Activity U project. The diagram below only shows the Echozone with some notes for discussing the process of fit between career themes and developmental projects.
The above diagram presents fits of two pairs of opposite themes. The “Theory v.s. Practice” fit is described with three movements:
- Practice-based Reflection: building rough models with intuition.
- Theory-based Reflection: improving models with theoretical resources.
- Theory-Practice Dialogue: turn models into frameworks and test it with cast studies.
The article Platform Innovation as Concept-fit offers a real example of these three steps.
It’s a challenge to share complex personal knowledge within the Echozone. I try so hard to design visual diagrams and write a book. The second part of THE ECHO WAY uses 76 pages to describe what I experienced with the Echozone. It’s all about deep thinking, personal reflection, boundary dialogue, etc.
9. LifeScope
I’d like to mention a trick about the fit with Echo Z. The meta-diagram below is designed for discussing Boundary Innovation.
To be honest, I only pay attention to the third container Echozone, and consider it as a “Figure” and the space outside the Echozone as “Ground”.
What does this trick mean?
It means we can put one pair of themes into “Ground” and ignore them and focus on the fit inside Echozone. For example, I considered the pair of themes of “China — America” into “Ground”, and only cared about the “Theory — Practice” fit and the “Concept — Diagram” fit for the Activity U project which is a Knowledge Curation project.
For the Life Discovery Activity, I’d like to use the notion of Lifescope to name Echozone. On Oct 22, 2021, I shared the Creative Work Canvas and coined a new term called Lifescope.
I drew the above diagram to visualize the notion of “Lifescope”. There is a dimension called Social Space behind “Self → Other → Field” and “Moment → Project → Theme” refers to another dimension called Biographical Time. These two dimensions define a creative person’s Lifescope.
A creative person’s Lifescope is defined by his creative work which can be measured with social space and biographical time.
The notion of “Lifescope” is part of the Career Curation Project. I adopted Alfred Schutz’s concept “The World of Working” to define the concept of “Career”. For Schutz, “The World of Working” is the opposite of the World of Fantasy and Dream.
I think the concept “The World of Working” is perfect for defining the concept of “Career” in order to consider paid work and non-paid work as a whole.
Moreover, I considered the “Figure” and “Ground” of “Career”. The “Figure” of “Career” refers to the part in which a person can directly work. The “Ground” of “Career” refers to the part in which a person can’t directly work.
For the Life Discovery Activity, I’d like to suggest people put two pairs of themes of “Figure” into the Echozone. This is the Lifescope, a creative space in which a creative person can determine the future.
A creative person should pay attention to what he can change in order to build his Lifescope and expand it.
10. Theme U v.s. Theory U
For readers who are familiar with Theory U, I’d like to point out several differences between Theme U and Theory U.
Theory U is a theory about organizational learning and change management. The theory was developed by Otto Scharmer who is a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, MIT, and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. In 2007, Scharmer published Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges.
The above diagram is the basic model of Theory U. The theory emphasizes a journey of U for developing the seven essential leadership capacities:
- Holding the space of listening
- Observing
- Sensing
- Presencing
- Crystalizing
- Prototyping
- Performing
The above diagram points out that the journey of U is a process. See the yellow arrow which means starting from left and moving to right.
Theme U is a meta-diagram, it doesn’t claim a certain direction.
Theory U is a systematic theory while Theme U is a meta-diagram that is only for building knowledge frameworks and visualizing thought.
The ECHO Way is a theoretical framework about boundary innovation, it is also about change. What’s the difference between the ECHO Way and Theory U?
- The ECHO Way has three phases: Life U: Think with the Theme U diagram; Project I: Act with the Developmental Project model; Echo Z: Reach the end of the journey: an expected place.
- Theory U has seven phases: see the above diagram.
The major difference between the ECHO Way and Theory U is theoretical resources and methods. According to Scharmer, “Our field walk incorporates three methods: phenomenology, dialogue, and collaborative action research…phenomenology focuses on the first-person point of view (individual consciousness); dialogue on the second-person point of view (fields of conversation); and action research on the third-person point of view (enactment of institutional patterns and structures).”(2007, p.19)
The theoretical resource behind the ECHO Way is Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory. Theme U and Echo Z are concrete applications of the Ecological Practice approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology. Project I is inspired by Project-oriented Activity Theory.
- From the perspective of the Activity System model, the Life Discovery Activity focuses on Detecting Potential Contradictions within a person’s life activities.
- From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, the Life Discovery Activity focuses on Exploring Potential Themes within a person’s life activities.
The ECHO Way and the Life Discovery Activity focus on Detecting Potential Contradictions within a person’s life activities and Exploring Potential Themes within a person’s life activities.
11. Life Discovery v.s. Sense-making
For readers who are familiar with Sense-making, I’d like to point out several differences between Life Discovery and Sense-making.
In general, we can say that Life Discovery is an activity of Sense-making. However, if we consider “Sense-making” as a theoretical concept, then we have to figure out the difference between Life Discovery and Sense-making.
In 2015, Peter Hayward Jones published a paper titled Sensemaking Methodology: A Liberation Theory of Communicative Agency. According to Peter Hayward Jones, there are several methodologies of sensemaking, “Each of the major contributors to sensemaking theories — Brenda Dervin, Gary Klein, Karl Weick, David Snowden, and Russell, Pirolli and Card have established different perspectives on sensemaking, each of which aligns to different human science philosophies, theoretical commitments, and normative perspectives. There seems to be no overarching sensemaking umbrella that neatly fits these together — a point Dervin has made.”
The above diagram presents five major sensemaking theories with different units of analysis.
- Weick’s focus has been organizational activity (collective), and the location of sensemaking is internalized as a representation of collective meaning.
- Dervin has a clear individual and hermeneutic approach, on the individual’s situation and their internalized subjective experience of it.
- Klein’s focus is the individual mental model (frame) applied to an external context or activity (how external data is represented).
- Russell’s information-theoretic view establishes sensemaking as a collective location (an information world) largely in the service of interpreting external data.
- Snowden’s more evolutionary model considers sensemaking a knowledge production activity, using data toward a shared understanding of problem areas (which I call “understanding about” as a unit of analysis).
I have read articles and papers about theories developed by Weick, Dervin, and Snowden five years ago. I’d like to point out that the Life Discovery Activity is about individual life development. So, Life Discovery is close to Dervin’s approach. However, the Life Discovery Activity doesn’t adopt the hermeneutic approach.
The diagram below represents Dervin’s Sense-making theory in the bridge metaphor.
Dervin’s model uses a bridge as a metaphor to describe the sense-making situation. For example, a friend of mine often lists a series of questions around a theme that is related to her goal. I once visited her personal website and looked at a list of questions about the theme of “Community” which is one of my favorite topics. After reviewing the list of questions, I didn’t figure out her real needs behind the questions. So, I asked her about this issue. In fact, she just roughly thought that “community, network, and similar things” are critically important for her enterprise. I told her the difference between Brand Community, Communities of Practice, Virtual Community, Community-led growth, Open Brand and Community, etc.
This is an example of sense-making and information behavior. We can apply Dervin’s model to this case. My friend wants to acquire practical knowledge and information (bridges) in order to make good decisions and take effective actions (outcomes) for doing X (context).
As mentioned above, The ECHO Way has three phases:
- Life U: Think with the Theme U diagram;
- Project I: Act with the Developmental Project model;
- Echo Z: Reach the end of the journey: an expected place.
The Life Discovery Activity focuses on Detecting Potential Contradictions within a person’s life activities and Exploring Potential Themes within a person’s life activities.
Thus, the ECHO Way and the Life Discovery Activity are more than sense-making. The important part of the ECHO Way and the Life Discovery Activity is Project I which is guided by the Project Engagement approach.
The Project Engagement approach is an application of Project-orientation Activity Theory. From the perspective of Activity Theory, the transformation of Self, Mind, Identity, and Theme, all depend on a person’s real actions. Think doesn’t mean change, it leads to actions which lead to change.
Update (Sept 17, 2023)
This article is part of my writing for the book titled:
Advanced Life Strategy: Anticipatory Activity System and Life Achievements
The book aims to introduce the Anticipatory Activity System (AAS) framework to the field of Life Strategy. Life Discovery Activity is considered a Second-order Activity while Life Performance Activity is considered a First-order Activity. You can find a short version in Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System.
I further developed the Concept of Lifescope for Creative Life Theory from Nov 2022 to April 2023. It also has a new name called “World of Activity”. See the links below:
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