The Things We Cannot Afford to Make Fast
By Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Some forms of value depend on the time we spend with another person, making speed an uncertain measure of improvement.
A music lesson lasts half an hour. During it, the teacher listens to the same passage several times, corrects a movement and waits while the pupil tries again. From outside the room, the activity may look repetitive. Little has been manufactured, and the melody is still imperfect. Yet the repetitions and the waiting are much of what the lesson provides.
We understand productivity most readily when more output can be produced with fewer resources. A machine makes a component faster; a better process removes duplicated work. The gain can release time and reduce prices. It is tempting to carry this expectation into every service, assuming that improvement should always appear as a shorter encounter or a larger number completed within the day.
Some services contain substantial waste and deserve precisely that scrutiny. A teacher should not spend an evening copying information between incompatible systems. A support worker should not have to reconstruct a record that another department already holds. Removing such burdens can improve the service while reducing the effort needed to administer it. The important distinction concerns which part of the time we are removing.
In certain encounters, time is an ingredient of the benefit. A pupil needs another attempt. A person trying to understand unfamiliar instructions needs a pause and a different explanation. A difficult conversation needs enough room for the initially polite answer to become an honest one. Making these exchanges faster may reduce their cost, but it can also reduce what the person actually receives.
Imagine a service assessed chiefly by the number of appointments completed. Staff may organise themselves better. They may also learn to close an encounter at the moment when the complicated question is about to emerge. The reported improvement then rests on a hidden change in the product. More appointments have been supplied, but fewer opportunities to work through a difficulty.
The objection is unavoidable: time costs money, and a long encounter for one person can mean a longer wait for another. Respecting the value of attention does not justify unlimited provision. Any serious argument must acknowledge competing needs and the possibility that some problems are better handled differently. The aim is to judge duration in relation to purpose, rather than treat either speed or slowness as inherently virtuous.
One practical consequence is that different parts of a service should face different expectations. Routine administration may benefit from automation. The person whose situation does not fit the routine may need the time that automation has released. If every saving is immediately removed from the budget, the institution can become technically more efficient while losing the capacity to respond to precisely those cases that require judgement.
There is a cultural choice here as well as an accounting one. We willingly recognise that certain performances take the time they take. A quartet cannot usually play a movement twice as fast while offering the same musical experience. We are less generous towards the patient explanation or repeated demonstration, perhaps because its quality is harder for an audience to applaud.
I would like economic discussion to become more exact about what has improved. A shorter queue is valuable. So is an encounter that resolves the reason someone joined it. Sometimes these goals reinforce each other; sometimes they compete. The task is to preserve the distinction long enough to make an honest choice. The pupil playing the passage again is not necessarily evidence that the lesson has become inefficient. It may be the moment at which the purchased time finally begins to work.