It was a hot and humid morning in College Station, Texas, and the campus was already in motion with what looked like a typical day of summer classes. I had just finished the first of my two classes and headed to Evans library to claim a study room for an upcoming history paper. There was no iPad or iPhone in sight, because it was 1996 and neither existed yet. I did not even own a laptop at the time. I had a textbook, a notebook, a pen, a mechanical pencil, a highlighter, and time. I spent two solid hours pulling books from the shelves, annotating the textbook, and copying notes from reference works on my topic. That was my routine through college and graduate school. The method was slow, and I have come to suspect the slowness was the point.
Today I teach college students who want to become teachers, and when I assign class activities I notice that they have every tool a student has ever wished for. They can generate a week of lesson plans in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee. Assessments assemble themselves. Rubrics arrive already aligned to the standards. So I have changed what I ask them to show me. I have stopped asking what they produced and started asking why any of it should be done at all. I find myself wondering what the work is doing to them, and whether moving through the process will leave them different at the end. The reality we are facing in education brings to mind a shift in thinking I experienced in graduate school.
During my doctoral work I read Larry Cuban’s How Can I Fix It? Finding Solutions and Managing Dilemmas. The insight that stayed with me was a single distinction. A problem can be solved, but a dilemma can only be managed. A budget shortfall or a scheduling conflict is a problem, because you can identify a fix and carry it out. The tension between widening access and protecting rigor is neither. The pull between supporting a struggling student and defending a standard is neither. Those situations never resolve. They persist, and they ask for judgment rather than answers.
We are living through a period organized around the removal of difficulty. The instructions are everywhere: optimize this, automate that, strip the friction from anything that slows us down. Artificial intelligence has poured accelerant on an instinct that was already strong. Nearly every conversation about it arrives at the same destination, which is less effort and faster results.
Much of that instinct is sound. Repetitive labor deserves to disappear, and time returned to families and to thinking is time well recovered. The promise is real, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. My concern sits one layer beneath the promise. We are becoming so fluent at removing complexity that we have stopped asking which complexities were doing something for us.
I caught the reflex in myself not long ago. I was drafting an essay from a single idea and a page of notes, and within minutes I was asking the only question the current culture had trained me to ask. How do I reach the finished version faster? The question was reasonable. It was also the wrong one for that particular task. When I looked back at the ideas that had genuinely reshaped how I think, none of them had arrived on schedule.
I want to be careful here, because there is an easy and false version of this argument. Difficulty is not a virtue on its own. A great deal of struggle is simply waste, and nostalgia tends to flatter the obstacles we happened to survive. The narrower claim is the one worth defending. Certain kinds of effort are not obstacles on the way to the work. They are the work itself. The judgment I want from my students cannot be downloaded, because it forms only through the act of wrestling with the tradeoffs in front of them.
This is the part that should concern anyone who leads. Educational leaders rarely distinguish themselves by producing documents faster than their peers. They distinguish themselves inside the dilemmas, where information is incomplete, stakeholders disagree, and no template quite applies. Consider the superintendent weighing whether to let an algorithm screen and rank a year of teacher candidates. The efficiency is obvious, and the tradeoffs are not. A leader who has quietly outsourced every difficult passage of that thinking has also outsourced the apprenticeship that produces judgment. The capacity tends to form through the friction, and rarely without it.
So the real question is not whether to use these tools. We should, and the cost of refusing them is genuine. The question is sharper than that. Which difficulties are developmental, and which are merely tedious? One useful test is to stop asking how quickly a task can be finished and to ask instead what the task is doing to the person performing it. Those are different measurements. One of them tracks output. The other tracks formation.
I think about those two hours in the library more often than I expected to. Not because the method was efficient, because it was not. I think about them because the slowness did something speed cannot. It kept me in a task long enough to be changed by it. The information age has made answers abundant and left discernment comparatively scarce. That gap is exactly where leadership now lives.
The temptation of this moment is to measure ourselves by how much friction we can remove. The challenge of this moment is knowing which friction to keep. That is not a charismatic skill. It does not announce itself or perform well in a demo. It is a quieter competence, the steady practice of calibrating which struggles are forming you and which are only slowing you down.
So the choice is not between speed and slowness. It is between education and formation. We can keep removing friction and trust that efficiency is always its own justification. Or we can hold onto the harder question: what is this work making of me? Ask it honestly and you uncover something no tool can hand back to you. The constraints we spent decades trying to escape were, in some cases, the exact conditions under which we became capable of leading. The slowness was never the cost. It was the point. It was the medium in which judgment formed, where a person learned not only which tools to use but which difficulties to keep. Call that calibration over charisma. It is not a luxury for an easier era. It is the work of this one.
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Reading this, I found myself feeling the same thing might be true of love, not only of judgment and learning. What you feel toward someone, and what that comes to mean for you — rather than the result of "knowing" it, the process of coming to know it is, in a sense, the irreplaceable part, I think. Even if the answer alone were handed to you up front, the weight it carries would probably fall away with it.
Seen that way, a lot of inefficiency may well be waste — but I have a feeling some of it isn't. And whether it is or not, you usually can't tell until afterward. If someone can judge in advance that "there's nothing to learn here," maybe they're already standing outside that process of coming to know.
And we don't always get to choose which inefficiencies we take on, do we. What comes down on us, for the most part, we can't pick. So what I'd rather have is the room in myself to keep any inefficiency from going to waste. Not that difficulty is good in itself — only that, when something has already arrived, I'd like to at least be able to turn it into something for me.