TALKING OUT LOUD | 2025-2Q | June 2025

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What are figs?  We think they're misunderstood. Brown, wrinkled, gritty fruit? Turns out that figs, initially, aren't even brown. Instead, every fig is a beautiful fleshy fruit pod containing hundreds of inverted pink flowers, each producing a seed. So figs are gorgeous fruit-flowers with hundreds of seeds. 

Figs flourish and grow solely because of a little insect called the pollinating fig wasp. A mutualism exists between the fig and the fig wasp.

Figs are flowers (beautiful, pleasant); wasps have stingers (somewhat scary). But both mutually need each other to survive. They live for, and because of, each other. Mutualism.

Getting to the Point: A Communications Analogy

Executive, Engineer/Technologist, Product Expert: Try seeing yourself as a fig (a pleasant flower holding hundreds of seeds in your head). Then think of your Communications team as a fig wasp whose sole responsibility is to take your seeds (your ideas, visions, strategies, features, functions, products), help make sense of them to others, then pollinate the market — the market being all the audiences that you need to buy-in to your ideas to ensure your survival.

Sure, it may seem scary to deal with a wasp; invite it into your head. It may be challenging to think through all of your ideas to explain them/your vision or what you're trying to do, build or sell. 

But when you do that — when you invite Communicators into your world — the thing you've only been thinking about ... flourishes and, somehow, becomes real. It gets life; it takes flight. Like the little thin-winged wasp that keeps the entire fig species from extinction. 

Evolve From Current to Future State Quicker ... to Expedite Sales

The Communications process has a way of seeing things in current state (exactly how they are) and exposing what doesn't ring right to help you get more quickly to the correct end state — that being the strategy, feature/function or product that passes muster and will sell. 

The Communications process can therefore help expedite your sales or buy-in process.

3 Sure Ways to Embrace Your Wasps

You need the wasps, the Communicators on your team. And they need you. You are the genesis where everything begins and they can't do what they do without starting with you first. It all starts with you. 

It's critical for you to embrace your mutualism with your Communications team and bring the wasps into your world so they can pollinate your ideas ... so you, your team, your company and your clients can thrive and survive. We recommend three sure ways to do this:

1. Meet Routinely; Give Your Wasps the Time They Need: Schedule routine meetings with your assigned Communications lead at least once each month and stick to it. Under no circumstances do you cancel that meeting. If you must reschedule, discipline yourself to move it to another time on the same day or, at least, within the same week. But I have a budget meeting; the president of the company wants to meet with me; my daughter's wedding ... Oh well. No excuses. No cancels.
2. Record Your Ideas Before You Meet: In last quarter's Talking Out Loud newsletter, we recommended that you record yourself as a first step in the process of getting your thoughts out of your head to share with your Communicators. If you missed, review the six simple steps you can use with one iPhone to record: Just Talk Out Loud 
3. Invite Your Wasps Into Your Pod: Figs grow in pods. As as high-level executive, engineer or product expert, you certainly have your pod: your team of equally high-level colleagues who are joined to achieve the same objectives/missions. Don't stop at the monthly meetings with your Communicators. Invite them to meetings that you have with your team (your pod) so that, through osmosis, your wasps can begin to understand your world, vocabulary, acronyms, short hand and who does what on your team. All of this helps ready Communicators to do their jobs, i.e., pollinate your ideas, strategies, features/functions, products into the market. It also eventually makes it easier for you. When you add a Communicator as an equal member of your team, they will organically begin to seamlessly and efficiently create the content needed to sell your seeds — with less and less effort from you.

We Can Help

If your Communications staff doesn't have the bandwidth to meet with you and your pod to learn about your seeds, Adele Archel Communications can buzz in and help.

CALL: 212.693.1749 | EMAIL: info@adele-archel.com | TEXT: 917.282.4827 

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