This module explains why communication, expectation management, and trust are the three pillars of the Inner Core — why they aren't naturally woven into your deliverables, and what each one actually looks like when it's working.

If you've been following this series, you've seen the empraxisOS™ Flywheel laid out in full. You've identified where your gaps are. You know the system has four layers — Inner Core, Outer Core, Mantle, Crust — and you know the sequence.

But before we get into stages and components, we need to spend real time on the center. Not because it's the most exciting part. It isn't.

It's the quietest part — the piece no client will ever expect on their invoice, the piece that shows up nowhere in a deliverable, and the piece that, when it breaks, you almost never see coming until a client is already gone.

What the Inner Core actually is

The center of the flywheel is occupied by three things: communication, expectation management, and trust.

These three aren't stages. They don't have a defined start and end. They don't belong to Position or Deliver or Grow. They run underneath every stage simultaneously — from the moment a client considers hiring you to the moment the engagement closes, and sometimes well beyond.

That's what makes them different from everything else in the system. Everything in the Outer Core is sequential. You position before you offer. You convert before you onboard. There's an order. But communication, expectation management, and trust don't wait their turn. They're active at every moment of the relationship — which is exactly why they're at the center.

The Inner Core doesn't pause when you're in the Attract stage and resume in Deliver. It runs the whole time.

Why three — and why these three?

This is the first question worth sitting with. The Inner Core could theoretically hold a dozen relational qualities: empathy, responsiveness, honesty, flexibility, transparency. The list goes on. So why communication, expectation management, and trust specifically?

Because these three are the only relational elements that exist entirely in the space between you and the client. Not in your deliverable, not in your expertise, not in your process. They're structural. And they operate at a different altitude from every other quality you might name:

• Empathy is a tool that enables communication.
• Responsiveness is a behavior that builds trust.
• Honesty is a component of expectation management.

Every other relational quality, traced back, is either a sub-component or an enabler of one of these three.

They're also the three things a client experiences directly, even when everything else is invisible to them. A client may never understand how you diagnosed their problem or managed scope. But they absolutely feel whether you communicated proactively, whether their expectations were managed well, and whether they trust you. These three are the client-facing surface of your internal character. And when any one of them fails, the engagement fails — regardless of the quality of the deliverable.

Why they aren't a natural part of the actionable steps

Here's the problem with the Inner Core: no stage owns it.

When you're working through Onboard — setting up goals and roles, getting the early win, building the project infrastructure — communication, expectation management, and trust are all active. But they're not on the checklist. They're not a line item in the proposal. No one reviews the engagement afterward and says "you scored a 7 out of 10 on expectation management."

What they will say is: "I felt like I never really knew what was happening." Or: "I thought we were aligned on scope, but apparently not." Or: "I just wasn't sure I could trust his judgment."

Those are the Inner Core failing — but because they failed invisibly, inside a stage that was technically running, they get attributed to the wrong cause. The client thinks the problem was the deliverable. You think it was the scope. Neither of you identifies the actual source.

David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford identified this pattern in The Trusted Advisor. Their research found that professionals consistently prioritize technical competence — the visible, measurable, credential-bearing part of their work — at the expense of the relational infrastructure that actually drives client loyalty.

Not technical mastery. Trust. The credential gets you in the room. The relationship determines whether you stay.

The three pillars, defined

Communication

Communication is not the same as being responsive. Responsiveness is reactive — you answer when someone asks. Communication is proactive — you tell people what they need to know before they have to ask.

The distinction matters enormously in consulting. A client who has to chase their consultant for updates is a client slowly losing confidence, even if the work is excellent. Every unanswered question, every week without a status update, every meeting that ends without a clear next step — these are small withdrawals from the trust account. They add up.

What communication actually looks like in an engagement:

• A weekly update that goes out regardless of whether there's news.
• A clear agenda before every meeting, and a written summary after.
• Proactively flagging problems before the client notices them.
• Being the one who sets the communication cadence, not the one who reacts to it.

Chris Voss spent 24 years as the FBI's lead hostage negotiator — work built almost entirely on communication, and specifically on the discipline of listening before talking.

Consultants tend to think of communication as the things they say — the updates, the reports, the presentations. Voss's point is that communication begins with what you hear. A client who feels genuinely listened to is a client who will tell you things. And a client who tells you things is a client you can actually help.

Most consultants are communicating. Very few are listening at this level. The ones who are tend to know things about their clients that their competitors don't — and that knowledge shows up in the quality of every recommendation.

Expectation Management

Expectation management is the most misunderstood of the three. Most consultants think of it as scope management — keeping the client from asking for things they didn't pay for. That's one narrow application. The real job is much bigger.

Every client comes into an engagement with a mental model of how it's going to go: how often you'll communicate, when results will show up, what "done" looks like, how much access they'll have, how much disruption it will cause. Most of these expectations have never been spoken aloud. They're implicit — carried from previous consultants, or simply assumed. Your job is to surface them, validate the realistic ones, and reset the unrealistic ones before the engagement starts, not after a problem surfaces.

The client cannot see your intentions. They can only see your behaviors. If your behavior signals "I'm on top of this," they feel confident. If it signals "I'm not sure what's next," they feel anxious — even if you're privately certain. Expectation management is the discipline of making sure your behavior consistently signals what you actually mean.

You make a promise. You follow through. You do it again. The client's sense of reliability accumulates in these small, repeated cycles. Break that cycle once or twice and you begin paying what Stephen M.R. Covey calls a "trust tax."

What expectation management looks like in an engagement:

• A kickoff that explicitly surfaces the client's assumptions, not just the project goals.
• A written scope that defines what's in as clearly as what's out.
• A cadence-reset conversation at the beginning of every new phase.
• Proactively naming what the next 30 days will and won't look like — before the client has to wonder.

Trust

Trust is the culmination. You build it through consistent communication and reliable expectation management — and then it either compounds or erodes depending on everything else in the relationship.

Most consultants think of trust as something you earn through competence: delivering excellent work, demonstrating expertise, showing results. Competence is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Maister, Green, and Galford offer a precise formula:

The denominator is the critical piece. When the client senses you're more interested in protecting your revenue than in helping them, trust deflates — even if you've never said anything to suggest it, and even if you've delivered excellent work.

Self-orientation is felt. Clients are remarkably good at detecting whose interests a consultant is actually serving. Much of empraxisOS™ stems from this idea. Stephen M.R. Covey frames the consequence clearly:

In consulting terms: low trust means more check-ins, more approvals, more scope disputes, more defensive documentation — more time spent managing the relationship instead of serving the client. High trust means faster decisions, more candid conversations, more latitude to do your best work, and more referrals at the end. The math is real.

Patrick Lencioni takes this into consulting-specific territory in Getting Naked, arguing that the fastest path to trust isn't competence or credentials — it's vulnerability.

This runs counter to how most consultants think about their professional image; the instinct is to project confidence and expertise. The practical translation: tell the client when you don't know something. Name the risk in a recommendation. Admit when you got something wrong before they notice. Every one of these behaviors costs your ego something — and earns your client's trust, which is more durable than any deliverable.

What trust looks like in an engagement:

• Being the one who names the problem in the room, not the one who waits to be asked.
• Giving an honest assessment even when it's not what the client hoped to hear.
• Following through on the small commitments — the ones nobody's tracking — as consistently as the large ones.
• Staying in the relationship through difficulty instead of retreating into process.

Why this matters more than your methodology

Here's the hard truth about the Inner Core: clients will forgive imperfect methodology. They will forgive scope that didn't anticipate every variable. They will forgive deliverables that needed a second pass. What they almost never forgive is feeling unheard, blindsided, or like they couldn't trust the person they hired.

Every consultant who has ever lost a client they thought was happy lost them in the Inner Core. Usually the deliverable was fine and the methodology was reasonable. But somewhere in the engagement, communication slipped, or expectations were misaligned and never corrected, or a moment arose where trust was needed and wasn't there.

How to build what most consultants never build deliberately

The Inner Core isn't built in one conversation or one deliverable. It's built in the accumulation of small, consistent behaviors — across an engagement, and across many engagements over time. Here's where to start:

What comes next

The Inner Core is the center, but it doesn't operate alone. In the next module we move to the Outer Core: the seven stages, why they're in this order, and what breaks when you skip one.

Every stage is a place where communication, expectation management, and trust either accumulate or erode. Once you see the system that way, you'll never look at a client conversation the same way again.

The Outer Core is where the actual consulting work lives — seven stages, running in sequence, each one dependent on the one before it. This module explains what the seven stages are, why they're in this specific order, why that order is load-bearing, and what breaks when you skip one.

The Inner Core — communication, expectation management, trust — is the force that powers everything. But a force needs something to move through. That's what the Outer Core is.

Seven stages, arranged in a specific sequence, each doing a different job. And the sequence isn't arbitrary — it's structural. Change the order and the system stops working. Skip a stage and you pay for it later, usually in a way that looks unrelated to the stage you skipped.

Most consultants have run all seven stages at some point in their careers. They just haven't run them deliberately, in order, with a defined process for each one. That's the difference between a consulting practice that compounds and one that resets to zero with every new client.

What the seven stages are

The Outer Core holds: Position, Offer, Attract, Convert, Onboard, Deliver, Grow. Not eight. Not five. Seven.

Each one represents a distinct discipline: a different type of work, requiring a different skill set, with a different deliverable and a different failure mode. When you collapse them or skip them, you don't save time — you create problems downstream that you'll spend far more time managing. Here's what each one does, plainly stated:

Why this sequence and not another

The order isn't decorative. Each stage depends on the one before it being in place. This is the piece most consultants miss, and it's why rearranging or skipping stages produces the problems it does.

You cannot build an Offer before you've Positioned. An Offer without a Position is generic. It describes what you do but not who it's for or why you specifically. A generic Offer can't command a premium because there's nothing to anchor the premium to. The Position comes first because the Offer is a direct expression of it.

You cannot Attract effectively without an Offer. Attract is the work of drawing people toward something. If what they're being drawn toward isn't clear — if they can't immediately understand what they'd be buying and whether it's for them — the Attract stage produces curiosity but not pipeline. Tire kickers, not prospects.

You cannot Convert without having Attracted. Conversion requires someone to convert. Without a functioning Attract stage, you're either cold calling into silence or converting exclusively from referrals — which means your pipeline is entirely at the mercy of whether someone happens to remember you at the right moment.

You cannot Onboard a client you haven't Converted. This seems obvious, and it is. What's less obvious is that the quality of your Convert stage determines the ease of your Onboard. A client who signed without full clarity on scope and expectations will show up to Onboard already anxious and already negotiating. The problems that surface in Onboard were almost always created in Convert.

You cannot Deliver well without having Onboarded well. Delivery without a solid Onboard is execution without alignment. The client doesn't know what success looks like. You don't know what the client values most. The work is technically correct and relationally incomplete — the setup for a client who says the engagement "didn't feel like a fit" even when the deliverable was sound.

And you cannot Grow without having Delivered. Growth — whether by referrals, retention, or expansion — is downstream of a client who has a real result they can point to and a relationship they trust enough to extend. You can't manufacture referrals from an engagement that underdelivered. The Grow stage is only as strong as what Deliver produced.

Michael Gerber spent decades studying why small businesses fail. His conclusion, laid out in The E-Myth Revisited, was that most people who start a business are technicians — deeply skilled at the work — who make a fatal assumption:

The consulting equivalent is the assumption that being excellent at the Deliver stage is sufficient for building a practice. It isn't. Deliver is one of seven. And in isolation, it produces a very expensive job rather than a business.

Seven stages, run deliberately, in sequence, is what turns the job into a business.

Why the order breaks when you skip a stage

Here's the problem that skipping creates: the symptom never appears in the stage you skipped. It appears downstream, in a stage you did run — and it looks like a failure in that stage when it's actually a failure in the one you missed.

A consultant who skips Position and goes straight to Offer will eventually notice they close at inconsistent rates, even on calls that seem to go well. They'll assume the problem is their sales process — the Convert stage — and try to fix it there. But the actual problem is that without a clear Position, they're attracting the wrong prospects. Some are a fit, some aren't, and they have no reliable way to tell the difference before investing an hour in a call. Convert looks broken. Position is the actual gap.

A consultant who skips Onboard — who signs the contract and moves immediately into Delivery — will eventually lose a client they thought was happy. The client will say something vague: "it just wasn't the right fit," or "I don't think we were aligned." They'll attribute it to a personality mismatch or bad luck. But the real cause is that the client arrived in Delivery with unresolved questions, unexpressed anxieties, and unmet expectations that Onboard existed to surface and resolve. Deliver looks like the failure. Onboard is the gap.

A consultant who skips Grow — who closes engagements without a formal Results & Closure conversation, without asking for referrals, without planting the seed for retention or expansion — will find they have to restart their pipeline from near zero after every engagement. They'll assume the problem is Attract. But it isn't. Grow, done well, feeds directly back into Attract. The referrals and proof a strong Grow stage produces are the most efficient Attract inputs available. The pipeline problem is a Grow problem.

Donald Miller's core argument in Building a StoryBrand applies directly here:

The same principle applies to a consulting practice: clients don't hire the best consultant; they hire the one whose offer is clearest, whose process makes sense, and whose positioning tells them — before they even get on a call — that this person understands their problem. All three of those things live in the stages that come before Convert. A consultant who hasn't built them is bringing exceptional skill to a conversation the client isn't quite sure why they're in.

The seven stages, in order, are that invitation — each stage building a clearer picture of what working with you looks like, and each one reducing the client's risk of hiring the wrong person.

The two altitudes, and why both matter

The seven stages don't all operate the same way. They split into two groups that make different demands on your attention — and fail for different reasons.

Michael Gerber's observation from The E-Myth Revisited names the first failure precisely:

Position, Offer, and Attract are exactly this. They are the business. The engagement stages are the job. Without the business-level work running consistently, the job never produces a pipeline that makes the next engagement easier.

The engagement-level stages fail differently. One Onboard is thorough; the next is rushed. One Deliver has weekly updates and clear scope management; the next goes quiet for three weeks and then surfaces a scope dispute. The inconsistency isn't laziness — it's the absence of a system. And without a system, quality depends entirely on circumstances: how much time you had, how demanding the client was, whether you remembered the step. That's not a practice. That's improvisation.

The process isn't a bureaucratic add-on to good consulting. It's the mechanism by which good consulting becomes repeatable — and by which the Grow stage produces the referrals that feed the next cycle.

What breaks when the Outer Core is incomplete

A consulting practice with gaps in the Outer Core produces recognizable symptoms. Which ones depend on which stages are missing.

If Position, Offer, and Attract are underdeveloped — and for most consultants, these are the gaps — the practice lives on referrals and relationships. When those networks are active, business is good. When they go quiet, everything goes quiet. The practice has no independent demand. It can't attract clients it hasn't met, and it can't command a premium because nothing is positioned to justify one.

If Convert, Onboard, and Grow are underdeveloped — the engagement-level stages — the practice acquires clients but doesn't retain them, doesn't generate referrals at a useful rate, and doesn't produce the documented results that make the next sale easier. Each engagement feels complete when it ends. But it doesn't produce the proof and advocacy the next Attract cycle needs.

What running all seven looks like

A practice running all seven stages in order is a different organism than one running two or three. It has a position that makes the right prospects self-select. An offer that makes scope and price legible before the first call. Pipeline that doesn't depend entirely on who happened to call this week. It converts at a consistent rate because the diagnosis process is defined and the proposal follows a structure. It onboards in a way that resolves anxiety and establishes alignment before the work begins. It delivers with quality and visibility. And it closes engagements with documentation, retention conversations, and intentional referral asks — producing the proof and advocacy that feed the next cycle.

It doesn't happen all at once. Most consultants build the Outer Core one stage at a time, starting wherever their gap audit pointed them. But the direction of travel is always the same: toward a complete system, running in sequence, compounding over time.

What comes next

The Outer Core tells you what the seven stages are and why they're in order. But knowing the stages isn't the same as knowing how to build them. That's what the Mantle is for — each stage breaks into three components, the concrete, operational parts that turn a concept into a practice.

In the next module we look at why three components per stage, why these specific components, and why the Mantle is where most of the real work of building a consulting practice actually lives.

Most consulting frameworks stop at the stage level. They give you the categories and leave you to figure out what to do with them. The Mantle is where empraxisOS™ goes one layer deeper — and that one layer is what makes this a system you can run, not just a framework you can admire.

The last two modules built the case for the Outer Core — seven stages, a specific order, each one dependent on the one before it. You understand that the sequence is load-bearing, that skipping a stage creates a downstream problem that looks unrelated to the stage you skipped, and that most practices are running two of the seven while wondering why they can't get out of feast and famine.

Understanding the seven stages is necessary. However, it isn't sufficient.

Knowing that you need to "get better at positioning" is not the same as knowing what to do to get there — what to actually do come Monday morning. Knowing that your Grow stage is weak doesn't tell you which part of it is weak, or what to build first. A map shows you the territory. An operating system tells you what to run and how to run it.

The Mantle is the operating system. This is where empraxisOS™ earns its name.

What the Mantle actually is

The Mantle holds 21 components, three per stage. Not sub-tasks. Not checklist items. Distinct disciplines, each with its own skill set, its own output, and its own failure mode.

The distinction between a sub-task and a discipline is worth sitting with, because the whole argument of this layer rests on it.

A sub-task can be rushed, delegated to someone less experienced, or skipped when time is short — because its absence creates a small and recoverable problem. A discipline cannot. A discipline is a category of work that requires a specific kind of thinking, produces a specific kind of output, and breaks in a specific way when it's missing.

You can rush the formatting of a proposal. You cannot rush the diagnosis the proposal is based on — not without producing a proposal that answers the wrong question at the right length.

Every component in the Mantle is a discipline in this sense. Diagnosis is a discipline. Scope & Proposal is a discipline. Agreement is a discipline. Three different types of work, each requiring different skills, each producing a different output, each failing in a different way.

Collapsing them into one activity called "the sales process" doesn't make you more efficient. It makes you inconsistent in ways you can't diagnose — because you've lost the ability to see which discipline broke.

Why three, and not more or fewer

Why three components per stage? Why not two, or five, or however many a stage happens to need? The answer isn't aesthetic or editorial. It's structural — and it's older than consulting.

Three is the minimum number of points required to create a stable structure. It's why bridges use triangles, why pyramids have stood for thousands of years, why the strongest natural and engineered structures in the world are built on triadic foundations. Strength, in nature and in architecture, comes from three.

Every stage in the Outer Core is built on the same principle. Three components. Each one a distinct pillar. Each one load-bearing. Not steps in a sequence where one leads to the next — pillars, where each one independently holds up part of the weight of the stage above it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A step can be skipped and the sequence continues. A pillar cannot be removed without the structure above it shifting — and when weight transfers to the remaining two in ways they weren't designed to carry, the whole stage becomes unstable in ways that are hard to diagnose, because everything still looks like it's standing.

A consultant who runs Position without Proof has two pillars holding the weight of three. Her Niche & Problem is clear. Her Point of View is sharp. But without Proof, the stage has no third point of contact with reality — and the client who can't verify the claim is left to decide on faith. The stage looks complete.

A consultant who runs Convert without a true Diagnosis — who goes straight from first call to Scope & Proposal — has removed the first pillar before the other two have something to build on. The proposal is structurally unsupported. Agreement follows anyway, but it's built on assumptions rather than understanding. That's not a strong foundation. That's a wobble waiting to become a collapse.

Fewer than three and you're collapsing pillars that need to stay separate. More than three and you're subdividing what's actually one load-bearing point into pieces that look distinct but function as one. The number isn't arbitrary. It's the minimum required to make a stage genuinely stable.

Atul Gawande spent years studying why highly trained, deeply experienced professionals fail — not from ignorance, but from inconsistency. Surgeons who know every step of a procedure miss one anyway. Pilots who have flown for decades skip a check they've done a thousand times. His conclusion in The Checklist Manifesto was blunt:

That's the consulting problem, stated precisely. You know what good positioning looks like. You've seen it work. And you still produce inconsistent results from one engagement to the next — because the knowledge hasn't been organized into a form that can be reliably applied. As Gawande puts it, "Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us."

The Mantle is that form: three pillars per stage, named and defined, so you know exactly which one you're building and can see clearly when one is missing. His further observation applies directly:

The Mantle isn't a script. It doesn't tell you what to say in a Diagnosis conversation or how to structure your Packaging. It names the pillars so you know which one you're building — and so you can see when you've accidentally removed one and called the structure complete.

This is where the OS lives

A philosophy tells you what matters. A framework tells you how to think about it. An operating system tells you what to run.

That distinction is the whole point of the Mantle. Without it, the seven stages are a useful map but not a runnable system. With it, each stage becomes a set of defined disciplines you can build, sequence, delegate, and improve. empraxisOS™ doesn't just show you the territory — the Mantle is what makes it executable.

A consultant who wants to "get better at positioning" has a goal. A consultant who has defined their Niche & Problem, built a Point of View, and accumulated Proof has a system. The goal is a direction. The system is what you actually run — and what you run is what you'll actually improve, because you can only improve what you can see, and you can only see what you've defined.

That is the Mantle working as designed. Each component, built and refined over time, becomes more reliable. The Diagnosis conversation you've run fifty times is sharper than the one you ran three times. The Packaging you've refined across a dozen engagements is clearer than the one you built once and never revisited. The Mantle doesn't just tell you what to build — it creates the structure inside which building becomes possible.

Jim Collins, after five years studying what separated companies that made the leap from good to great, found a parallel pattern:

The framework of responsibilities is the Mantle. Disciplined thought is knowing which discipline you're running and why. Disciplined action is running it consistently, not just when a client demands it. "The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency." The Mantle is the structural remedy for that inconsistency.

Why this is where most practices are built or abandoned

The gap audit revealed where your gaps are at the stage level. The Mantle is where you discover why they exist.

Most consulting gaps aren't at the stage level — "I don't do Attract." Most are at the component level: "I have some Visibility, but no Authority content running and no Pipeline system." The Attract stage is technically present. Two of its three disciplines aren't.

And the components that go unbuilt are almost always the ones with no external deadline. No client is asking for your Point of View today. No prospect is following up on your Pipeline development. No one is checking whether you've formalized your Proof. These disciplines are urgent to your practice and completely undemanded by anyone currently on your calendar.

That's where Steven Pressfield's concept of Resistance applies with unusual precision. In The War of Art, he defines Resistance as the force that stands between the work that matters most and the professional's willingness to sit down and do it:

The consulting translation: the more a component matters to the long-term health of your practice, the easier it is to defer. Position's three components — Niche & Problem, Point of View, Proof — are the highest-leverage work a consultant can do. They're also the work with the least immediate pressure. Resistance loves this arrangement. It will suggest you do them tomorrow, next quarter, once things slow down, once you have more clarity.

Pressfield's description of the professional stands in direct contrast:

Building the Mantle components is professional work in exactly this sense. You build Point of View before anyone asks for it. You develop Proof before a prospect demands it. You create a Pipeline system before your current engagement ends and the silence starts.

This is why most practices are built or abandoned in the Mantle. Not because the components are complicated — they're not. Because building them requires showing up to do work no one is currently demanding. That takes a different kind of professional commitment than the engagement-level work most consultants are already excellent at.

How the Mantle connects to what's above and below

The Mantle doesn't operate in isolation. It sits between two other layers, and both relationships are active.

A proposal delivered to a client who trusts your judgment gets read as a recommendation. The same proposal delivered to a client who isn't sure you understood the problem gets read as a transaction to negotiate. The Mantle component is the same in both cases. The Inner Core is the difference.

This is the most important thing to understand about the Mantle's position: it is the working layer. The Inner Core powers it. The Crust reflects it. But the Mantle is where the actual work of building a consulting practice gets done — one discipline at a time, across seven stages, over the course of a career.

What the Mantle asks of you

A philosophy requires understanding. A framework requires study. An operating system requires something more demanding: consistent execution, whether or not anyone is watching, whether or not a client is currently demanding it, whether or not you feel ready.

The components most likely to be missing from your practice are not the ones you don't know about. They're the ones you've been meaning to build. Point of View. Proof. Pipeline. Results & Closure. Referrals & Advocacy. You know what they are. You've thought about building them. Resistance has suggested that now isn't the right time.

The Mantle doesn't require you to build all 21 components at once. It requires you to be honest about which ones you're actually running and which ones you're deferring — and then to start building the next one.

That's the OS at work. Not a theory of what your practice could be. A set of disciplines you run, refine, and compound over time, each one making the next engagement slightly more reliable than the last.

What comes next

The Crust — the outermost layer of the flywheel, what the client feels when each stage is done right.

Most consultants have never thought of the client experience as a layer of their operating system. They think of it as an outcome — something that happens or doesn't, depending on whether the work was good. The Crust reframes it as the most honest quality-control mechanism in the system.

That's the argument the next module makes. And it's a harder argument than it sounds.