Deb Zahn: I want to welcome you to this week's episode of the Craft of Consulting Podcast. So, on this episode, we're going to talk about naivete. And in particular, how you can choose a very deliberate form of naivete that's going to serve your business, and it's going to enable you to serve your clients better. And we're going to dive into what that has to do with strategy, innovation, and all kinds of fun things with Joshua Berry, who's got a book that's coming out on this topic. And he's going to share some highlights of it, as well as how you can have a return on investment, but also ripples of impact, and what that means in terms of doing good business, which is ultimately good business. So, we hit on so many good things in this episode. Let's get started. I want to welcome my guest today, Joshua Berry. Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Berry: Deb, I'm excited to be here with you today.

Deb Zahn: So, let's start off. Tell my listeners what you do.

Joshua Berry: Deb, I am the co-founder and CEO of Econic. Econic is a strategy and consulting company that helps mid-size organizations. At the heart of what we do though is we make space for people to practice the behaviors that grow themselves and their companies. And we've been in business for about eight years. And when we're not doing Econic, I'm a father of four, love art, as you can see in the background here, music, running books, all fun things.

Deb Zahn: Wonderful. That's fabulous. Well, we're going to talk about naivete today, which I just love that topic. So, first of all, let's start off. When you say that word, what do you mean?

Joshua Berry: Yeah. So, I do have a book that's coming out in September called Dare to Be Naive. And we're going back to what's actually a more classical definition of naivete, what we're talking about is being authentic or being your true self and letting that come through. I got excited as I was doing some research for this book, and through a number of interviews, kept hearing leaders say, "This might sound naive, but..." And then, they'd share this amazing story, or insight, or something philosophical. After a while, I just wanted to scream, "Well then, just be naive. It's OK." Especially, when it's coming from a well-learned spot.

And what I learned is, it was more of a chosen naivete that these people embraced. And so, yeah, that's definitely something I encourage people to take on. And especially, in the world of consulting, when you are maybe stepping into a consulting role in the very first time or those first couple of years, there's so much fear. I mean, I can remember it, Deb, those fears that you have of stepping into it. You might feel like you're ignorant or naive. And often, that's my encouragement is to help people to step into that.

Deb Zahn: Love it, love it, love it. And so, if somebody had that chosen naivete as you describe it, what would that look like? What would the attributes be?

Joshua Berry: It is someone who is curious, someone who is all right pausing and listening to themselves, as well as listening to the things that are outside. Right? There's a spectrum of naivete that I talk about in the book. And I'm not asking people to be willfully ignorant, right? But, I'm also saying that the other side of being willfully cynical is also not where I want people to live. Right?

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: So, if I had to boil it down, it's maybe an invitation to ask people to do what is reasonably and intuitively right for them, the balance of those two things.

Deb Zahn: Love it. Love it. And I know one of the things you also connect with it, and this made me smile ear to ear when I saw this, is also, thinking about business in a different way. So, thinking about business as two types of ROI. Can you talk about what those two types are and how chosen naivete weaves itself into that?

Joshua Berry: Yeah. Yeah. So, most all of us know, traditional ROI, or return on investment, and especially for-profit business wouldn't, or even not-for-profit businesses would not be around if they were not able to return on the investment of time, and talent, and treasures that are put into them. But, through the research, I came across to this concept actually connected to Chip Conley and some of his faculty members at the Modern Elder Academy. And they were talking about the idea of another ROI, which was, ripples of impact. And so, it also spoke to legacy, spoke to something that perpetuated based off of what you put into it. And so, what I advocate for is that the best leaders, especially those who are wanting to leave that legacy or make a bigger impact, they do focus on a return on investment because it earns them the right to keep coming back and making even more ripples of impact.

And quite often, what I found is, you can actually get a good return on investment by focusing on the impact that you're trying to make to others. And so, we came up with the quip of, doing good in business is good for business. And that absolutely is true. To the point of chosen naivete, a lot of society would say, "You can't think like that." Right? And concepts I explore in the book, for instance, of extending trust first, or giving more, or coming at things with an abundant or optimistic mindset. There are a number of people who would say, "Ah, I don't know if you can do that." And yet, there's a lot of successful stories and leaders out there who choose to do that.

Deb Zahn: And so, thinking of consultants, one, as leaders, and as folks who are working with businesses and organization that have leaders. If you were standing in front of a consultant and said, "Look, if you really want to embrace this notion of chosen naivete for the benefit of both of those, your business and whoever you're working with." What advice would you give them?

Joshua Berry: I mean, back to what I mentioned before about doing what is reasonably and intuitively correct for you.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: What I found is that a lot of consultants are just fine on the reasonable and the logical side of things, right?

Deb Zahn: Right.

Joshua Berry: We could outthink ourselves. I'm absolutely in that camp. We're going to analyze everything. They're hiring us to figure out what the answers are. What I'd say is the best advice is to figure out how to tap into even more of that intuitive side. In fact, part of the mission of the book is to raise up that idea that intuitive, emotional, spiritual, all these other things that our ancestors used to help guide themselves in life actually need to be buoyed back up and get back into the right place as they were with rational thinking.

Deb, you may not even know, but naive actually had a positive to a neutral intonation in our ancestors' tongues. It wasn't until the age of enlightenment that naive started to become something that was negative because the root word translated to native. And during the Enlightenment, colonialism, and everything, as we were taking over things, being native was a bad thing. And so, you wouldn't want to be naive or a naif. And so, what happened was just age of reason, and logic, and everything just continued to win out. And so, what I would do is I would encourage that consultant to say, "There is a lot of wisdom that you've probably earned, and you carry with you, and you need to make space to be able to listen to both of those things."

Deb Zahn: Yeah, I love that. I feel like it should be called the “Age of Irony” given that. They cut off half of what brings wisdom and knowledge to people. That's a sad thing. So, consultants obviously have to show up to their clients, and they hear the same things that you heard, which is, "I hate to sound naive, but..." And you hear people talking about wanting to have those ripples of impact, whatever words they're using to describe it, or even when they're trying to approach innovation, which I know you folks work quite a bit with innovation, how can a consultant encourage in their clients to give into those wisdom-oriented naivete?

Joshua Berry: Yeah. First off, I'll say, it's hard because in the traditional thought of bringing in a consultant was, "I don't have the answers. I need to go find someone who has the answers." And therefore, they were renting your brain and sometimes your hands, right? But a lot of times, you're renting your brain. With how quickly the world changes, what we've seen is the role of a majority of consultants, not all of them, at least the ones I like to hang out with, has shifted away from renting of brains and more of building capabilities within organizations. And so, what I mean by that is, we model naivete many times with our clients because we'll come in and they'll say, "Well, how do you do this thing?" And we'll say, "I don't know. I haven't seen your thing before. But what I would happily do is work with you through these techniques, frameworks, and other things to help you learn how to learn through the thing that you need to do."

And so, most all of our projects, and programs, and things that we work on, we explicitly tell them, "We do not have the copy and paste from another organization. There are potentially other, more classic consultants for that. You can go adopt their things. But we believe in five to seven years, you're probably going to need to hire another consultant to adopt the next thing that's hot." We'd rather teach them how to adapt, which many times is using work and projects to help them learn how to come up with hypotheses, and test, and experiment, and learn, and try. And all of those things, back to your question, require a certain level of naivete because you have to say, "I don't know. Or you have to bring some humility and at least curiosity to figuring out what the right answer might be.

Deb Zahn: Now, I've certainly had consulting clients who are like, "Just tell us what to do. You've worked other places. Just tell us what to do." And they might have some resistance to sitting in that place of not knowing, which can be scary, and all kinds of things attached to that. First of all, forget how you work with it. We'll talk about that in a moment. But, how do you know that's going to be a fit? That they're going to be able to learn new ways of thinking, learn new beliefs, and learn new practices?

Joshua Berry: In those early discovery conversations, we are seeking out examples of where they've done it before. I'm sure, Deb, you've done consulting long enough to... You're trying to understand early in discovery of, have they and has their organization had experience with consultants in the past? I don't know how many times I have spent a lot of coffees and a lot of lunches, only to learn that their organization never uses consultants. So, why would they risk us being the first ones that would be brought in?

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: So, in those discovery phases, I'm trying to learn, do they have a culture where it's OK and acceptable to use consultants? Do they have experience themselves? And then, what type, right, of consultant that they've had? And so, a lot of times, that is the way that we will suss out are they one who's going to be more open to this learning-based approach? The other is by the nature of our work. About half of our work is in the innovation and strategy space. And so, we luck out, in that, we get a lot of people who are already having a pretty growth mindset towards what they want to do and where they're going. And so, that makes it a little bit easier for us too. We're not always working on extremely technical problems, where it might be a little bit harder to figure that out.

Deb Zahn: And so, if you get the right fit, so they're like, "Yeah, they're the innovation and strategy folks. And we like that. So, we want that." And so, if you get the right fit, what are some of the first things that you do with them to set the stage for this way that you're going to work with them?

Joshua Berry: Some of the first things we're trying to understand is, what is the tension that exists between where you are today and where you're trying to go? So, the classic consultancy stuff. But, probably a nuanced thing is we also try to understand for that person and the team members who are working on it, what is it that they're working on? Right? What do they want as a win or growth out of this particular project that we're doing? And that comes back to just a deeper philosophical belief that I have, which is, work is one of the best places for people's growth. Right? And if you can approach it as, "Wow, what a great opportunity for people to be able to more fully become themselves through the work that they get to do." Well then, every project or program we get to step into is just one more opportunity for that sandbox of people to play in.

And so, we approach it not only between, "What's the tension between your point A and point B for the project, or the program, or whatever needs to be built?" But also for each person. Right? "What's your point A to point B?" And how do we help them fully understand that, and what they might be going through. I think that's extremely important too. And maybe this is another deeper conversation later. But, there's so much that comes out of a person that then is played out in the policies, and procedures, and relationships, and other things that they do in the world, those ripples that are out there, that if we don't also take an opportunity to help that person grow and overcome whatever the next thing is they're doing, it's just going to continue to replicate itself out in that.

Concrete example, if I, as the CEO, am dealing with a lot of scarcity in my life, maybe even from my childhood. You know, Deb, that that's going to come out in the compensation policies of Econic. Right? So, how do we help leaders and team members, et cetera, not only work on becoming the best versions of themselves for themselves, but also because it elevates the work that will hopefully come out of that project?

Deb Zahn: Ooh, I love that. And I love that example. And so, let's talk about leaders a little bit because obviously, leaders have to be willing to embrace some of that chosen naivete and allow the innovation process to unfold as it's going to unfold. And not necessarily be able to see the precise vision of what's going to be at the end, which I know is a real struggle for a lot of leaders. So, how do you help them be in that place and allow the process to happen?

Joshua Berry: Yeah, a couple of things. One of the first ones is, we will try to ensure that if it's not the top leader in the organization, let's say, we're working with a vice president of innovation or so, we try to ensure we have executive sponsorship, and we are working on maybe some of the elements of innovation, governance, or strategy with that organization because we need to provide, some people will call it, the air coverage. I don't care for that term. But, basically, provide the safe space for that leader to be able to work in their program because it's not going to create automatic results. And so, we have to do our work understanding what's all at play in the system here to be able to do it. And probably just because we've failed a couple of times of just going in and just working on this program. And then, it gets killed by something else.

Deb Zahn: Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Berry: And so, we're like, "We don't need to do that anymore." The other thing though is, we just help people reframe what they're doing. So, we're working actually now with another person who's just moving into the first senior innovation role that their company has had in a formal, that's the first time they've ever formally had it. And they have 2,000 employees.

Deb Zahn: Wow.

Joshua Berry: And one of the first things that I helped him understand was, "You're going to want to find the right innovation framework, pipeline, coaching, and programs that you're supposed to do here. I'm going to tell you, there isn't one and that isn't your job. Your job is to move this forward in a productive way. And in a couple of years, someone else is going to come in and they're going to do the next right thing that is supposed to happen."

And so, I've seen this play out again, and again, and again, there's almost more value in the movement and growth, and this could apply beyond innovation, this is your tech stack, this is your organizational structure, whatever it might be. There's a large CPG company that we work with, that it feels like every five to seven years they do an organizational shakeup, and they just flip the matrix to the other side. "Now we're going to be product line. Nope, now we're going to be practice based." Whatever it might be. I think there's more value in those transitions than there is, "Now we got the right one."

Deb Zahn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joshua Berry: Does that make sense?

Deb Zahn: It does. Because, I think, people used to think, and I actually never thought this was true, but we definitely know it's not true now, is you figure out the strategy, and then you execute.

Joshua Berry: Yeah.

Deb Zahn: And then maybe later you need another strategy and then you execute. And I find that because I do strategic planning, where people are solid, "We know what we're doing in the next three to five years." I'm like, "Do you though?”

Joshua Berry: There's as much value, yeah, in the discipline of that, right?

Deb Zahn: Yeah. And "Did you know that before the pandemic? How did that go?"

Joshua Berry: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Deb Zahn: But it hits on something that I can imagine happens, you can tell me if this is true, which is, I can imagine there's times where people embrace the chosen naivete and they're like, "Oh, he's so right. This is the right thing to do." And then, it also gets scary, gets a little nervous, feels like the wheels might be coming off the bus, and that's because you're like, "No, we're on a plane now."

Joshua Berry: Love that. Yeah, yeah.

Deb Zahn: And so, that naivete interrupt us, or whatever you want to call it. How do you work with that to keep people willing to continue to embrace chosen naivete as innovation is unfolding or growth is unfolding?

Joshua Berry: Yeah. When we have a really solid relationship with our key project lead, we'll say, or other things, we can have those conversations to say, "Cool, what are you feeling? Why are you feeling that? How is that going for you?" Et cetera. What's interesting is sometimes that anxiety or that unease about, "I don't know how this is going." I can help people see that, that's just the other side of the coin of, you're doing really important work that matters.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: If you didn't actually have that anxiety or those butterflies in your stomach when you weren't pushing into something, you probably wouldn't have that feeling. And so, I guess, the broad thing on that is, giving them context and helping them see that a lot of that is normal. There's a image that I like to use from Meg Wheatley in the Berkana Institute. That's the two-loop model of change.

And basically, it's different than the old school, Dr. J. Jellison, J Curve, like, "You're here, and then it's going to be bad. And then, someday you're going to be better." Berkana said, "Yeah, you've got this. But you've got this other loop that's happening at the same time. And what that is, is it's something that worked really well for you for a while, is now dying off." In fact, they will even use an ecosystem word, "It's going into hospice, as something new is emerging." And I think, as consultants, as people helping others through change, we don't always acknowledge that we're working with people in this liminal state, where we're allowing something new to emerge at the same time as something else has to have the space and grace to quite literally die. If that makes sense.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And so, we need to be stewards of that, as we're going through it. And it isn't just about cramming, getting our project done, getting our billing out, and getting all of those things. Concrete example for you. We're working with a long-term client who just launched a new project a few weeks ago. And it got to a spot last Friday, and they said, "You know what? We need to pause for a couple of weeks because of some inner turmoil that's happening here." It was really easy for us to be able to say, "Great. That is what's needed. Something is finally working and breaking through. One leader is finally having their issues and working through it. Here's some space to be able to deal with that loss that's happening with this here."

And back to the consulting business, we've been able to manage our business in a way that has built in resiliency from a financial standpoint, from a project standpoint, from a capacity standpoint, that we can be there to say, "Cool. Let's give you the space you need to be able to work through that." Versus, all of a sudden, our motives or our goals start to become intention, right, with what those are.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: Does that make sense?

Deb Zahn: Yeah, I love that. And it reminds me of a couple of things. One is that, when I'm talking to a potential consulting client, one of the things I always tell them is, "If we get to a point and we see new things or we see something we haven't talked about before and we need to switch up, we're going to tell you we should switch up." And they're always shocked by it. Because they're like, "Aren't you taking that thing off the shelf and ramming it down our throats?" Because that's the consultants they're used to.

Joshua Berry: Sure.

Deb Zahn: And I've done it, where we've gotten to a certain stage, and including when I'm working with other folks on teams, and I've said, "This isn't a fit because we didn't know that, and we didn't know that, and if we keep heading down this road, they're not going to get the outcome. So, what do we do differently? And what conversations do we have with them?" And clients love it. The right clients love it because you get to show that you care more about the outcome than putting money in your pocket.

Joshua Berry: Very well said. Very, very well said. And I think you have those choices in terms of, again, what type of consultant you want to be and how you want to show up. We've decided we want to work with a few clients. And by that, we want to work with a few leaders, and have great relationships with them, and serve them in a bunch of different ways.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And because we've taken that approach, that allows us to do exactly what you're saying. Again, for those who can't see the video, I keep pulling my hands up ridiculously open. It's going into those conversations saying, "Yep, you know what? We shouldn't pick that project back up." Or "We should stop." Or,"We should pause." And to your point, Deb, you then earn the trust to be able to enter into new engagements with that same way to say, "I don't know what this is going to be in two months. Let's scope it out like this. And then, let's revisit when we get there, and see if this is making sense or not." And they trust you. And you can do hopefully what's right for the client, right?

Deb Zahn: Yeah. There's nothing like saying to a client, "Don't pay me to do that. I don't think that's going to serve you." To build a trust, it's a beautiful thing. But I was also struck when I was thinking of how consultants show up also with the naivete in those situations where you're doing strategy innovation. And so, one thing I do a lot is I facilitate, and I tend to facilitate when the outcome is unknown. They don't know what ultimately they want. And so, I'm helping them birth that with them. I consider myself more like a midwife, than anything else.

And somebody after one of the times I facilitated a large group came up and she's like, "I don't know how you do it." She had seen me facilitate many times. She said, "There's always a moment where like, 'Deb's not going to be able to pull this off.'" And then, she's like, "And then, you do." And I said, "I just want you to know, at the moment you're feeling that I'm probably feeling that too. There is always a moment when there's a complex facilitation and a complex thing that we're working with, where my brain suddenly says, 'Yeah, I don't know how we're going to land this plane.' But then, I also just trust the process, I trust my skills, I trust... But, I'm not trying to force an outcome. I don't know where we're headed. And I have that same moment of doubt. And then, I just take the next step, and then I just take the next step." And she was shocked.

Joshua Berry: Well said.

Deb Zahn: But that's part of a creative process.

Joshua Berry: Yep. Well said. And what I love about that story, Deb, is you being open and honest and transparent with your client, hopefully then gives them permission to do that same thing. Because, I imagine, that individual, as well as other people you and I work with, as leaders, face that all the time, they're working on things that are unknown outcome-oriented ideas. And they have to admit sometimes they're making it up the best way they can, and relying upon their values, their principles, their skills, and other things to meet the situation where it is. And so, I love that.

Deb Zahn: Yeah. And imagine leaders communicating that to their team.

Joshua Berry: It would be amazing, right?

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And that's the chosen naivete, right? Willfully ignorant, again, is not what I'm asking for here. I'm not just like, "Oh, let's just try things." It is about saying, "This seems reasonable. And intuitively, I think, I understand enough about myself, my role in this world, what we're doing, where we're trying to go, to just leave a little bit of space here for what's next." Right?

Deb Zahn: And not slip into the cynical either, as you mentioned. I remember a leader when I was employed saying, "That's never going to work. We've tried implementing in those sites multiple times, nothing ever works." And that was it. And I said, "Well, I'm going to try something a little bit different. Let's just give it a shot." And I ended up betting them 10 bucks it was going to work. But the reason it did is because we went into the situation and asked questions. We didn't assume that we knew more than the folks who were working in there. We talked to them about, just as you said, "What worked before? What didn't work before? What kills initiatives here?" And it made it pretty easy to then find a path because people could tell us. They showed us the graveyard, and they told us, "Here's how initiatives ended up in that graveyard."

Joshua Berry: Yeah. Well said. I know this is the Craft of Consulting Podcast, but I would call myself a facilitator way more often than I am a consultant.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And what I love about the word facilitator is that word facil at the beginning, which is ease. Our role is just to make it easier for the client and our partners to get from where they're going to the next thing.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And many times, that means, we are using the brains in the room or outside of the room to be able to get to those things. We don't need to be the smartest brain when we're facilitating, making it easy to get to that. And oftentimes, it'll increase buy-in, and you have better ideas, like you said.

Deb Zahn: Love it, love it, love it. Well, you and I obviously could talk about this forever in a day. But I want to hit upon one other thing because I was so impressed by this when I went to your website. So, Econic itself, it walks the talk, which always makes me very happy. So, you're a B Corp, which I highly commend and celebrate, but you also release a very transparent impact report. But, talk about willingness to chosen naivete for all to see. It was beautiful. So, can you describe what it is that I'm oohing and eyeing over? And why you folks did it?

Joshua Berry: Yeah. The idea of thinking about the work that we're doing out in the world and our role in it, especially from a sustainability and more of a regenerative approach is really important to Econic and our core values. And as you mentioned, we are a certified B Corp. There is a very, very rigorous assessment process that goes with that. And part of that assessment process does ask us to put out an impact report out into the world. That said, even if we didn't, we've gotten into a habit now of putting out these impact reports that I think we would do it anyways because it helps us keep our commitments that we have out to the world of what we want to do.

And so, yes, if you go to our website, you can download, and you can see more or less how much money we donate, what client work we're doing. There's a couple of great client success stories that are on there. There are even the things that we've tried that didn't work. And we are constantly trying to work on ourselves in coming up with new experiments and evolving how we work as we're helping our clients evolve how they work.

Deb Zahn: The thing that also really impressed me is you talked about your employees, you talked about the folks who work for you, and were quite transparent about new things that you're trying, and what some of the data is from your assessments. I mean, that is just cool as hell, I got to tell you. But yeah, say a little bit more about where did that part come from? Because that's a thing that a lot of firms, they would consider that the sausage making, and we don't share the sausage making.

Joshua Berry: There's a couple of things about it. One is, outside of everybody who's now listening to this podcast, and 1% of you who will go and download this, our view is that there's probably only hundreds of people who will ever see this report that's out there, right, to be very fair. And so, when we think about it, and we want to put it out there, it is truly about transparency, and what would we want our clients, and what would we want our employees, and our contractors to see? So, oftentimes, we're building these reports for them because we intentionally send it out and share with all of those people.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: And we have pride, right, around that. It also helps highlight, to your point, some of our maybe evolving philosophies around employees, and what that relationship looks like. So, specifically, what I was going to mention a moment ago is, we call out in this year's impact report that we made some good progress on shifting our internal bonus program to one that is now much more equitable. We used to do a percentage of salary, now we're in a spot where we calculate off of our profit shares, and it goes to people based off of the hours worked.

And so, it's almost an equalizer because we believe that everything that brought you here, in terms of the education, experience, and everything that you have, those will be reflected in some ways on base compensation. But, your time is your time. And so, we want to treat it equally as valuable. And so, it's equal profit share based on hours that people put into it, which is unheard of.

Deb Zahn: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: We didn't have good progress though on some audacious goals we had around pay transparency. And so, we're still in process of working on those. And we call out both of those things in there because I think it's important for our employees, our clients to know those things, and to just demonstrate the same types of things we're trying to practice with our clients.

Deb Zahn: Good business is good for business, so I love it.

Joshua Berry: I hope so.

Deb Zahn: So, where can folks find you in your fabulous book when it comes out?

Joshua Berry: Thanks. So, if you want to learn more about Econic, you can go to econic, that's E-C-O-N-I-C.co, not .com. That extra M was going to cost us $39,964. So, we are econic.co. And if you want to learn any more about the book, the website is daretobenaive.com. And I think, we're most active on LinkedIn. That's where you can find most of our articles and posts.

Deb Zahn: Wonderful. And I'll put links to all of that in the show notes. So, let me ask you this last thing. So, where do you find balance in your life, however it is you define that?

Joshua Berry: Good question.

Deb Zahn: Deep breath.

Joshua Berry: I find balance in, one, actively working with a coach, a therapist, other people in life, and being open to those things, and talking about it. I find balance in continually working on that voice in my head of productivity guilt. And working against this need to achieve that I've had most of my life. And so, it's a lot of pausing and awareness around that. And I find balance by reading a lot. I have a problem with books. Looking over there, my daughter helps me sort through another box of books and understanding that. But, not only books, but enjoying music, and art, and other things, just to try to keep some of that balance. I'm also clearer and clearer about knowing what it is that I'm great at, which is only a couple of things, and then finding other great people around me who are awesome at those other things. And so, I think it's right sizing what some of those things are, and that goes a long way to creating a bit more integration.

Deb Zahn: Wonderful. Well, Joshua, I appreciate this so much. I'm excited for the book to come out because I read about it before you came on, and just hearing about it, people would do well with more naivete in their life. So, I appreciate you coming on and talking about it.

Joshua Berry: Deb, thank you so much for having me, for your great stories, and all the great work that you're doing to help people become the best consultants that can be.

Deb Zahn: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Craft of Consulting podcast. I want to ask you to do actually three things. If you enjoyed this episode or you've enjoyed any of my other ones, hit subscribe. I got a lot of other great guests that are coming up in a lot of other great content, and I don't want you to miss anything.

But the other two things that I'm going to ask you to do is, one is if you have any comments, so if you have any suggestions or any kind of feedback that will help make this podcast more helpful to more listeners, please include those. And then the last thing is, again, if you've gotten something out of this, share it. Share it with somebody you know who's a consultant or thinking about being a consultant, and make sure that they also have access to all this great content and all the other great content that's going to be coming up.

So, as always, you can go and get more wonderful information and tools at Craftofconsulting.com. Thanks so much. I will talk to you on the next episode.