I’m Trying to Build Myself Out of the Loop

I like being useful.

Someone asks a question, and I know the answer. Something breaks, and I can fix it. A decision stalls, and I can help move it forward. A student struggles to express an idea, and I can give them the words. A repetitive task annoys me enough, and I’ll probably automate it.

For much of my career, those things felt like evidence that I was doing something right.

And sometimes they are.

Experience should make us more capable. Leadership should help us solve difficult problems. Teachers should help students when they’re struggling. Technology should make things easier.

But lately I’ve been thinking more about what happens after I help.

Does the person become more capable?

Or do they become more dependent on me?

That’s a much less comfortable question.

I’ve spent much of my career becoming useful by being the person who could solve the problem. I’m increasingly interested in a different measure of usefulness: whether the people and systems around me become more capable because I was there.

In other words, I’m trying to build myself out of the loop.

Being Needed Isn’t Always Evidence That Something Is Working

Being needed feels good.

There’s satisfaction in having people trust us with difficult problems. There’s recognition in being the person who knows the history, understands the system, remembers what happened last time, or can get something unstuck.

Organizations reward this behavior, too.

The person who saves the project gets recognized. The manager who answers every question appears responsive. The employee who works late demonstrates commitment. The technical expert who can fix anything becomes indispensable.

I’ve been that person plenty of times.

The problem is that indispensability can mean two very different things.

It can mean someone has valuable expertise.

Or it can mean we’ve built a system that can’t function without them.

Those aren’t the same thing.

A useful test I’ve started applying is simple:

What would happen if this person or resource weren’t available?

Sometimes the answer is perfectly reasonable. Specialized knowledge exists. Emergencies happen. We rely on one another. I’m not interested in creating organizations full of completely independent people who never need help.

Healthy organizations are interdependent.

I’m more concerned about unnecessary dependency: work that cannot move because one particular person must approve it, explain it, remember it, rescue it, or do it themselves.

Leaders can accidentally create a lot of that dependency.

Leadership Taught Me the Cost of Becoming the Answer

One strange thing about becoming more experienced is that solving problems often gets easier.

You’ve seen something similar before.

You know whom to ask.

You recognize the risk.

Someone brings you a problem and, before they’ve finished explaining it, you’re already thinking about what they should do.

So you tell them.

Problem solved.

That’s efficient.

It’s also potentially a trap.

The next time a similar problem appears, where do they go?

Back to you.

Eventually, a pattern develops:

Problem → leader solves it → problem disappears → everyone learns to return to the leader

The leader gets busier. Decisions start waiting. People become reluctant to move without approval.

Then the leader wonders why nobody takes enough ownership.

I’ve spent plenty of my career stepping in because I could solve something faster. Sometimes that was exactly what the situation needed.

Other times, I was quietly teaching everyone to wait for me.

That’s one reason I’ve become interested in the distinction between helping and rescuing.

Rescuing asks:

How do I solve this problem?

Helping asks:

What does this person need from me to solve it themselves?

Maybe they need context.

Maybe they need access to information.

Maybe they need another perspective.

Maybe they need permission to make the decision.

Maybe they need a question rather than an answer.

And sometimes they need me to get out of the way.

That’s harder than it sounds.

If I already know what I would do, watching someone find their own approach can feel painfully inefficient. They might even choose something I wouldn’t.

But if I solve everything because I’m faster, I’m optimizing today’s problem at the expense of tomorrow’s capability.

Teaching Made This Easier to See

I’ve been seeing the same pattern in teaching English.

A learner stops mid-sentence.

They know what they want to communicate but can’t find the English.

They look at me.

I know the answer.

Giving it to them is easy.

It also feels helpful. The awkward silence disappears. The conversation keeps moving. Everyone is happy.

Except the next time they need that expression, they may look at me again.

So I’ve been changing how I respond.

Wait a little longer.

Give a clue.

Ask a question.

Bring back something we practiced earlier.

Let the learner retrieve the English instead of supplying it immediately.

Sometimes that means sitting through many uncomfortable seconds while someone searches for words.

That’s okay.

The struggle is doing something.

The goal isn’t to prove that I know English. That’s already pretty well established.

The goal is for the learner to become increasingly capable of communicating without me.

That changes how I think about teaching.

Scaffolding is useful because someone needs it now.

Good scaffolding should eventually disappear.

A student might initially need a sentence starter, then a few keywords, then a question, and eventually nothing at all.

If the student permanently needs the teacher’s framework, prompt, correction, or encouragement to communicate, we’ve created another dependency.

That’s not very different from leadership.

Then AI Complicated the Question

AI makes this much more interesting because we’re rapidly expanding what we can hand over to technology.

I’ve been thinking about that progression as:

Answer this → Build this → Do this

We started by asking AI questions.

Now we’re asking it to create things with us.

More and more, we’re asking it to act on our behalf.

That’s incredibly useful.

I use AI regularly. I also build automation because repetitive work bores me to heck.

I’ve called this productive laziness for years.

I’m perfectly willing to work hard on something meaningful. But once I’m doing the same thing repeatedly, I start asking why I’m still doing it.

Can I eliminate it?

Simplify it?

Delegate it?

Automate it?

AI massively expands what’s possible.

But it also introduces a question that traditional automation didn’t force me to confront quite as often:

Does this automation increase human capability, or merely increase convenience?

Consider a student writing a paragraph.

I can give the paragraph to AI and ask it to rewrite everything correctly.

We’ll have a better paragraph in seconds.

But do we have a better writer?

Maybe not.

Instead, AI could identify where the student’s reasoning becomes unclear, show an example at an appropriate level, and ask the student to try again.

Now AI is still doing work.

But that work is helping the learner do something they couldn’t previously do.

The same applies outside teaching.

AI can write a meeting summary so nobody has to take notes.

Useful.

But perhaps the greater value comes when it notices recurring unresolved decisions and helps the team recognize a pattern.

AI can generate a project plan.

Useful.

But perhaps it should also surface assumptions, missing dependencies, and risks so the project manager can make a better plan.

AI can recommend a decision.

Useful.

But sometimes the better system provides the information, context, and alternatives that help a person exercise better judgment.

Current thinking on AI leadership increasingly emphasizes judgment, trust, ethics, and human accountability, even as routine work becomes easier to automate.

The goal isn’t keeping humans involved simply because humans used to do the work.

That’s just protecting old processes.

The question is what human capability still matters once the unnecessary effort disappears.

Productive Laziness Needs a New Question

My instinct toward automation hasn’t changed.

I still don’t think people should spend their lives doing repetitive work simply because that’s how the work has always been done.

If software can move information between systems reliably, people shouldn’t copy and paste it.

If an automated process can compile routine reports, people shouldn’t spend hours assembling them.

If AI can handle administrative work around a lesson, I’d rather spend that time understanding and preparing for the learner sitting across from me.

Automation can create room for better human work.

That’s the point.

So I’m adding another question to my productive laziness:

Does this automation increase human capability, or merely increase convenience?

When I’m deciding what to automate, I’m increasingly interested in three things:

1. What effort am I removing?
2. What does that freed capacity allow us to do better?
3. Will we become more capable as a result?

Convenience isn’t bad. Sometimes saving ten minutes is reason enough to automate something.

But capability is a more interesting outcome.

Automate effort in ways that increase human capability.

Let machines handle repetition so people have more room for judgment.

Automate administration so people have more room for relationships.

Reduce information gathering so people have more time to understand what the information means.

Remove unnecessary work so people can put their effort somewhere that actually matters.

That’s a version of productive laziness I can get behind.

Building Myself Out of the Loop

The same idea keeps coming up in different parts of my life.

As a leader:

Give people context and boundaries instead of requiring approval for everything.

As a teacher:

Give learners enough support to move forward, then gradually remove that support.

As an automation person:

Remove repetitive effort while creating more room for human judgment and meaningful work.

As someone using AI:

Ask whether the tool helps people become more capable or simply encourages them to stop thinking.

The common idea isn’t independence.

We need each other.

I want students to ask questions. I want teams to collaborate. I want leaders to step in when circumstances genuinely require leadership. I want people to use technology that makes their lives easier.

Building myself out of the loop doesn’t mean disappearing.

It means changing what I contribute.

From answers toward better questions.

From approval toward context and boundaries.

From rescuing toward coaching.

From holding knowledge toward sharing it.

From doing repetitive work toward automating it.

From using AI as a replacement toward using AI to expand what people can accomplish.

The question becomes:

What can I contribute now that makes my contribution less necessary later?

Maybe Becoming Less Necessary Is Progress

This way of thinking doesn’t always come naturally to me.

Being needed feels good.

Solving the problem myself is often faster.

Ego is also wrapped up in being the person with the answer. If everyone needs my knowledge, experience, or approval, it’s pretty easy to convince myself that I’m important.

I’m learning to be more suspicious of that feeling.

Sometimes leadership means stepping forward.

Sometimes teaching means giving the answer.

Sometimes an emergency genuinely needs the experienced person to take control.

The goal isn’t to avoid being useful.

It’s to pay attention to what our usefulness leaves behind.

Did I solve today’s problem while making tomorrow’s problem more likely to come back to me?

Or did someone learn something?

Did they gain confidence?

Did knowledge spread?

Did decision-making move closer to the work?

Did technology remove something tedious while giving someone more room to think?

Did the system become a little less dependent on any one person?

I’m still learning to build myself out of the loop.

But increasingly, I’m asking myself one question:

When I’m no longer around, did I leave behind more capability than dependency?

If the answer is yes, maybe becoming less necessary isn’t becoming less valuable.

Maybe that’s the point.

For more reflections on living and working deliberately, you can read about the thinking behind ImMichaelCannon.

The usable shift: The next time someone asks for your help, pause before giving the answer and ask: “What can I do here that leaves this person more capable than they were before?”