Appropriating Activity Theory #12: Agency Resonance Behind the Project Network (2022)

Last updated on 01 Mar 2026

This post is part of the "Appropriating Activity Theory" series, which reflects my creative journey of engaging with Activity Theory from 2015 to 2025.

by Oliver Ding

February 28, 2026

On July 7, 2022, I made a diagram.

It showed three layers stacked on top of each other. The top layer, shaded blue, was labeled Themes — and inside it floated several circles: PEA, LAA, AAS, CPN, LAP. The middle layer, green, was labeled Projects — with LDA branching down into SIA, SSL, and MNB, each anchored to its platform (Coda, Lark, Milanote). The bottom layer, pink, was labeled People — a single node, BIO, connecting outward to LinkedIn and Medium.

1 — LAA — The “Life as Activity” Project
2 — PEA — The “Project Engagement” Approach
3 — LAP — The “Life as Project” approach
4 — LDA — The “Life Discovery Activity” Project
5 — AAS — The “Anticipatory Activity System” Framework
6 — SIA — The “Significant Insights Analysis” Project
7 — BIO — The Biography
8 — MNB — The Board @ Milanote
9 — SSL — The Shaper & Supporter Lab (SSL) Program
10 — CPN— The Complexity of “Project Network”

Looking at it, I saw something I hadn't fully seen before: I had been running a project network for the past six months without knowing it was a project network.

This diagram was the beginning of Project Engagement v2.1.

The earlier version, v1.0, had focused on a single relationship: the person and the project. Why does someone start a project? How do they develop within it? The frameworks I'd developed — the Developmental Project Model, the Zone of Project — all operated at this one-to-one level. A person. A project. Their encounter.

What the diagram showed was a different kind of complexity. Not one person and one project, but multiple projects in relationship with each other, organized across levels, influencing and feeding into one another. The unit of analysis had shifted from a dyad to a network. From person–project to project–project.

This new layer became the foundation of v2.1: the complexity of the Project Network.

But I didn't arrive at this diagram by sitting down to theorize. I arrived at it by living through a six-month period of dense, overlapping, mutually entangled work. To understand what the diagram means, you have to understand the journey that produced it.

1. January: A Friend's Program and a Sailor's Mandala

It started with a friend.

In June 2021, a friend of mine had launched an online adult development program she called the Shaper & Supporter Lab, or SSL. The program was built around three components: Life Purpose Awareness, Personal OKR Practice, and Peer Review and Feedback. Members gathered monthly in a peer-support structure hosted on Lark, an enterprise collaboration platform.

I joined SSL as an advisor and a researcher. From the beginning, I was curious about it from multiple angles at once. As a researcher, I wanted to study it through the lens of the Project Engagement approach. As a participant, I was directly inside the activity — observing not from a distance but from within.

On January 4, 2022, reflecting on a discussion about the SSL program, I drew a diagram I called the Sailor's Mandala. The metaphor it proposed was simple: life is sailing at sea. The boat is your social container — the family, team, project, or community you're part of. The sea is the social context and environment around you.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was the first drawing of a journey that would take six months to complete.

2. February: Tools Taking Shape

Through January and February, I worked on building out the theoretical tools I needed for what I was beginning to call the Life Discovery Project — an attempt to apply Project-oriented Activity Theory to the question of how people actually discover and develop their lives.

On February 7, I published the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1), nine questions organized into nine modules. It was my attempt to make the Life-as-Project approach practical — not just a theory to think with, but an instrument to work with.

On February 27, I developed the Life Discovery Canvas (v1.0), organized around six basic principles of the project-centered approach. The canvas sat at the center of four quadrants: Think, Say, Learn, Do — and pointed outward to the surrounding ecology of any project: Situations, Opportunities, Demands, Knowledge, Problems, Ideas.

These tools were being built partly for research, partly for practice. I was thinking about them through the SSL program I was observing. The SSL program was testing ideas I was developing. The work was already circular, already networked — though I hadn't yet named it that way.

3. March: The AAS Board — Designing a Program

On March 22, 2022, a new project formally began.

I had been developing the Anticipatory Activity System (AAS) framework — a theoretical model for understanding life as a forward-looking, anticipatory activity system. Now I decided to apply it directly. I created the AAS Board: a real 1:1 life coaching program hosted on Milanote, a visual digital whiteboard platform.

The program ran through eight steps — Aspiration, Awareness, Achievement, Design, Deployment, Delivery, Modeling, Storytelling — following the structure of the AAS4LT framework I had designed. I invited a friend to join as the first participant. For her, this was a Life Discovery Project. For me, it was both a service and a research site.

This mattered for reasons I would only later fully understand. Where SSL was someone else's program that I was researching as an outsider-within, the AAS Board was my own program — I was the host, the designer, the coach. Two programs, similar in function, radically different in my position within them. One was Lark; one was Milanote. One was peer-network structure; one was 1:1 coaching structure. The contrast between them was becoming one of my most productive points of observation.

4. April–May: The Slow Cognition Project and Twelve Insights

Alongside both the SSL research and the AAS Board program, a third thread was running — quieter, more internal, but in some ways the most important.

I had been practicing what I called the Slow Cognition Project: an ongoing effort to study my own creative work over time, tracking how concepts and insights emerged and developed across extended periods. Where SSL and the AAS Board were explicit, structured programs with defined participants and meeting times, the Slow Cognition Project was tacit — embedded in my daily thinking and writing, without a formal schedule or container.

On April 25, 2022, this tacit project produced something visible. I published an article listing twelve significant insights I had captured from January through April. A Significant Insight, as I was defining it, was not merely an interesting observation. It was an insight that had led — or could lead — to actual change in activity. Looking backward, you could identify them by their consequences.

The twelve insights ranged across themes: Thematic Spaces, Points of Observation, the relationship between Knowledge and Discovery, the structure of Second-order Activity. Each one had emerged from the friction of working across multiple projects simultaneously — from comparing how SSL and the AAS Board operated differently, from noticing patterns that only appeared when you were inside more than one thing at once.

On May 5, I took this further, developing a distinction that had been forming since the Slow Cognition Project began: the notion of Hiddenness. Second-order Activity — the activity of reflecting on one's own activity — could be either Tacit or Explicit.

SSL and the AAS Board were Explicit Life Discovery Projects: they had defined structures, visible containers, people gathered intentionally around a shared purpose. The Slow Cognition Project was Tacit: it had no formal container, no meeting times, no enrolled participants. And yet it was producing some of the richest material.

5. June: The Network Becomes Visible

By June, all three projects were running. Themes were being tested by projects; projects were generating new themes. The AAS framework was being refined through watching SSL develop. The AAS Board program was being guided by sub-frameworks that had emerged from what I learned through SSL. The Slow Cognition Project was capturing insights that emerged from the friction between all of them.

On June 7, I used the model of "Project Network" for the first time in an article about Knowledge Centers — arguing that a knowledge enterprise is not a single project but a multi-level network: a network of Themes, a network of Projects, a network of People.

Three weeks later, on June 26, I sat down to reflect on the entire journey. That's when I made the diagram: three layers, all the abbreviations I had been living with for six months (PEA, LAA, AAS, CPN, LAP, LDA, SIA, SSL, MNB, BIO) suddenly arranged into a legible structure.What I could now see was that the development of themes and the development of projects had been intertwined all along in such a way that they actually relied on each other. The AAS framework had been tested by watching SSL develop; SSL had inspired sub-frameworks; the AAS Board had been guided by those sub-frameworks. Everything was connected — not in a chain, not in a hierarchy, but in a network where each node was both product and producer.

This was the conceptual move that became Project Engagement v2.1: the expansion from person–project to project–project, from individual engagement to the complexity of the Project Network.

6. February 2026: What I Now Call Agency Resonance

I am writing this in late February 2026.

Over the past two months — January through February — I have been living through another dense, overlapping period of work. Multiple projects running simultaneously, ideas emerging from one project and finding their home in another, connections lighting up between things I hadn't yet seen as connected. The rhythm of it has felt familiar. It has felt like 2022.

In the Four Bureaus of Agency framework I have been developing recently, I gave a name to this structural pattern: Agency Resonance. It describes a situation where multiple activity circles activate simultaneously, trigger each other reciprocally, and produce emergent patterns that none of them would have generated alone. Not a chain, not a hierarchy — a resonant network, where the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.

Looking back now at what happened in the first half of 2022, I can see it clearly: that was Agency Resonance. The SSL program, the AAS Board, the Slow Cognition Project — these were not three separate projects running in parallel. They were three nodes in an active resonant network. Each one was generating energy that the others could use. The twelve Significant Insights I captured in April came from a mind that was simultaneously inside three different learning contexts at once, noticing what only becomes visible from that multiply-positioned vantage.

At the time, I described it with the structural language of Project Network — the project-project relationship, the multi-level organization of themes and practices and people. That description was accurate. But it was a description of the architecture.

What I can name now is the experience inside the architecture: the feeling of a network coming alive, of projects beginning to speak to each other, of each new insight lighting up connections that hadn't yet been visible. The emergence of that July 7 diagram was not the beginning of Agency Resonance. It was the moment the resonance became conscious — the moment I saw the network that had been quietly running beneath everything I'd been doing for six months.

In 2022, the discovery was: projects form networks.

What I understand now is: those networks have their own kind of energy. When the conditions are right — when multiple projects overlap, when each generates material the others need, when the person moves fluidly between all of them — something ignites. The network resonates. And the insights that emerge from that resonance are different in kind from anything a single project can produce.

This is what I was living in the first half of 2022. This is what I am living again now.

v1.0 - February 28, 2026 - 2,030 words