A post by our guest editor, John Worthington.

Somewhere between the noise of frameworks and the glow of dashboards, we seem to have misplaced our principles.

We can recite ITIL practices, COBIT controls, ISO clauses, and Agile ceremonies faster than a teenager can scroll through TikTok — but ask why we’re doing any of it, and you can watch the room fall silent.

That silence? It’s the sound of dogma replacing reason.

Voltaire had a word for this.

In the 18th century, Voltaire waged war not against people, but against unthinking obedience. He mocked the clerics and courtiers who hid behind rituals they no longer understood. He believed reason — guided by principle — was the only way to keep civilization from devouring itself.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” he warned.

He wasn’t just talking about religion or monarchy. He was talking about us — anytime we let rules replace judgment, or process replace purpose.

Fast-forward 300 years. The temples are now called frameworks, the priests are consultants, and the catechism is compliance. We’ve built whole ecosystems of governance that claim to liberate us, but often just trade one form of superstition for another.

The Algorithm Will See You Now

In the white paper “AI and Principles: The New Enlightenment of Service Management,” I argued that artificial intelligence is forcing a reckoning.

AI doesn’t care about your org chart or your “best practice.” It reflects what you feed it — and magnifies whatever it learns. If you’ve built your house on unexamined rules and inherited checklists, AI will make that ignorance scalable.

But if your systems are built on clear principles — fairness, transparency, learning, empathy — those same algorithms can amplify your wisdom instead.

It’s not about teaching machines to be moral; it’s about teaching ourselves to be.

The Enlightenment, Rebooted

The Enlightenment wasn’t a rebellion; it was a correction. Humanity stopped bowing to arbitrary authority and started asking why. That’s where service management is today.

The new revolution isn’t another framework. It’s a return to principle-driven management systems — like the one described in the white paper — where:

  • Reason over ritual replaces “because the process says so.”
  • Transparency over authority replaces “because the boss said so.”
  • Empathy over efficiency reminds us that people aren’t process variables.
  • Learning over labeling ends the illusion that maturity is a score.

Voltaire might say: we don’t need more frameworks; we need fewer absurdities.

A quiet reflection

And then there’s that small, steady voice — the one that doesn’t shout or mock or fight, but just smiles and asks, “What if we simply got back to helping one another?”

That’s where the real enlightenment begins — not in rebellion, but in rediscovering the simple, human principles that make service management worth doing in the first place.

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