I woke up on Sunday with a renewed urgency for the mission of Caroline Manages and what I’m doing here – what we’re doing, together. In doing so, I think I closed a loop that’s been open for me for years now: what it means to professionally value love.
Between the disturbing and disheartening news of the white supremacist gunman in Buffalo, NY on Saturday, and the horrific implications of overturning Roe v Wade, it has been challenging recently for me to get in touch with my second core value: love, that elusive, airiest and most-challenging value. But I first started writing about love a long time ago, and I meant what I wrote so much that I pasted it into the “About CM” page on my website:
We are not discouraged by small defeats or placated by temporary victories.
(Yes, I am pull-quoting myself. Forgive me, I’m going through something here.)
So I did spend some time this weekend feeling sad and disheartened about the world and wondering why a person would build anything at all. And then I thought: because this is the most important time there could possibly be to build anything at all, if it comes out of the things you value most.
Three years ago, I experienced a similar values-crisis by realizing that in spite of heart-knowing that I valued love deeply, I didn’t really head-understand what it meant to value love professionally – at least, not in a way I’d be able to articulate externally. In order to attempt to rectify this, I dove into a comparative reading of national constitutions (because this was the best example I could find of declaring one’s values on a large scale) and read about thirty of them. Two of the major ideas this project illuminated for me:
- The idea of a preamble: a description for why you would write such a document, and what you want others to take away from it–what you want it to do, or empower others to do.
- The idea that “it doesn’t have to be this way”, which encompassed everything I was feeling about the country I live in. Many countries have beautiful constitutions that assert a country’s obligations to all of its citizens, and to creating a world where each person can flourish accordingly. (South Africa very profoundly calls this the responsibility to “free the potential of every person”; it is not an exaggeration to say that reading these words for the first time that summer changed the direction of my life.) (I gratefully credit Andre Henry with my introduction to the concept of “it doesn’t have to be this way”.)
So then (still back in summer 2019, here), I started thinking about my own values (justice, love, competence, interdependence, hope) and I started to understand that if one is to act in service of a greater idea, one must articulate the values one stands for – and that I could not, as I mentioned above, articulate what it meant to me to value love.
To rectify this, I then spent about a year reading the complete works of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., who’d written at great length about the Beloved Community, and the very concrete goals that love could realize when organized in community. I used up notebooks and sticky note flags and a not-insignificant portion of my freely-allotted Google Drive storage to parse it all out. I can’t distill everything I learned into one paragraph, but I can write one very salient one:
Dr King (as you may already know) believed in many different types of love, including agape love, which has been defined in many ways by many sources: selfless, sacrificial love, made out of choice rather than through attraction or obligation, and concerned not with self but with the greatest good of another, intentionally desiring another’s highest good. I knew that whatever I was looking for, the idea of agape love was going to be wrapped up within it.
And then, buried midway through Stride Toward Freedom, one of MLK’s frankly driest books, written more as a documentary instruction manual than the passionate sermons he’s more famous for, I found it when he described agape love as “redemptive good will”.
This is what it took to wrap up all the pieces together: this definition of love as a property that acts as a redemptive lever – but only if we take responsibility for organizing it into the world – in the face of an unjust status quo, rooted unshakably in good will. Even (especially) when it seems like you are the only one rooted in good will. This is what it meant for me to value love.
I knew this three years ago, but I didn’t understand until this weekend that the reason I’ve felt unresolved in my heart all this time is that great preambles articulate their organization’s defining values in service of what they will build together. And now, the final piece is that I understand what I’m building, and that Caroline Manages is rooted in this transformative, redemptive good will aimed at the world. Love is the force that sees gaps between a vision and reality and says: it is worth my effort to fix this. To me, love and justice hold hands, always.
My first value, justice, might not appear on its face to be inherently related to project management, but I’d push back on that by insisting that the most-just world is a world where everyone can contribute to what they love in the ways that matter to them. If everything in the world is made up of projects (and it is) then we cannot progress toward a more just world until anybody who likes can learn more about project management. I understand now how important it is that I add my voice to the managers and community organizers who have been doing this work long before me, and to encourage and mentor the folks younger than me who will be doing it long after me.
And so I am finally ready to write my preamble: I, Caroline Horste, in service of a more just, loving, competent, interdependent, and hopeful world, am thrilled to throw my heart, mind, and resources behind Caroline Manages, LLC, as I and many others work toward equity across the profession of project management.
It is a bit odd to write a preamble before the Constitution, but as I look forward to a season of growth for CMLLC, I also know that it is important to have north stars. This is mine. I don’t yet know what will constitute my work when I’m done, but I know what it roots look like and I know what its north star looks like and I think that is enough. It’s only yet spring, after all.
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