The Packaging and the Payload
I.
As I’ve run and studied meetups, there’s a useful metaphor that’s become more important to how I think about them. For most meetups, there’s the packaging, and a payload, and these are related but useful to approach separately. Allow me to expand.
The payload is the thing you actually want. If you order some socks off Amazon, the payload is the socks. If you take a college class, the payload is the information you wanted to learn. If you went on the internet to find pictures of cute kittens, the payload is the image of an adorable feline.
The packaging is the wrapper and delivery mechanism for the payload. If you order some socks off Amazon, the packaging is the box they came in. If you take a college class, the packaging includes the professor and the lecture hall and to a lesser extent the dorm room and the cafeteria. If you went on the internet to find pictures of cute kittens, the packaging is everything on the website that isn’t cute kitten.
Thinking about them as separate but related parts may not be carving at any joint in physical reality, but I find it a useful distinction.
II.
Start with the payload. Almost everyone does.
The payload changes completely depending on your field. Socks, scientific discoveries, action movies, and your twitter feed are not the same. [Citation needed.] What part of the thing you’re trying to get or offer is the goal? Are there differences in quality, or is one pretty much like another?
This is what almost everyone pays attention to. It’s the most visible part, and if you didn’t have the payload there would be no point to any other part of the process. If you want to improve the payload, you find domain experts in that specific domain. Maybe you find specialists in sub-domains; a textiles expert isn’t as useful as a clothing expert who isn’t as useful as a socks expert. If the idea of a socks expert seems silly, consider a college lecture where you might have a professor who is really good at explaining, say, circuit theory or the baroque period of architecture.
The payload matters. In one sense, it’s the only thing that matters. If there was no payload, there would be no point to anything else in the process. Nobody bothers setting up lecture halls and registration for information nobody cares for anyone else to learn. Amazon is not in the habit of mailing empty boxes to your house.
All the parts that aren’t the payload are the packaging. This is the wrapping paper and cardboard and bubble wrap around the thing you ordered. As someone who has ever worked in logistics and manufacturing, packaging matters. Anyone who has ever had incompetent movers will back me up, but even if you haven’t had that kind of experience then ordering a TV from online and having shipped without any kind of container is a recipe for receiving a broken TV.
Many kinds of packaging are ongoing. The TV, its table or stand, the surround sound system, all of this is a package for the TV show you’re watching. I’m not just gesturing at the obvious physical detritus of delivery here.
Packaging can get just as detailed and specialized as payloads. Just look at say, Bits About Money (a newsletter about paying for things) for the amount of fractal detail you can find in the problem of getting people what they want. At the upper end, packaging becomes a payload of its own; consider for a moment being the Director Of Buying Cardboard Boxes at Amazon.
III.
In my observations, people who get deeply into designing payloads start having strong feelings about packaging.
For the fastest proof of this, go ahead and try to badly teach a proof around a professional mathematician. This isn’t recommended, both because the grinding of their teeth has been cited by marine biologists as being a major source of noise pollution that drives whales away from Californian cities, and because you are probably allergic to being throttled. This generalizes to anyone who makes things though. A partner of mine once worked for a glass-making company, and I had a fascinating conversation with the packaging department at a company picnic.
Good packaging isn’t just about not breaking the payload in transit. It can also enhance the payload. Advent calendars achieve this, using artwork and anticipation to turn what’s usually sub-par chocolate into something much more fun than it would deserve. For that matter, Christmas presents are a tradition of joy and delight where the bows and red wrapping paper are an important part.
Examples of packaging information well include restating it, or changing the language to fit the culture[1], or a good voice actor reading an audiobook. It can involve getting a newscaster to say the information instead of a random twitter account so that people feel they can act on it. It includes writing well; consider that most of the information Matt Levine writes about is available elsewhere, but isn’t available in as readable a format.
Packaging is surprisingly transferable. Amazon is good at mailing books, multivitamins, computer monitors, and soccer balls. Jim Dale is good at reading Harry Potter novels, Dickens novels, children’s stories about circles, and poetry about 9/11. Expert teachers are a little more bound by the domains they’ve learned to teach, but still usually good at teaching anything they know.
IV.
So what about meetups?
All the parts that aren’t the payload are packaging. Packaging is surprisingly transferable. It helps to have a little domain knowledge about the subject of the meetup, but it also helps to have a little domain knowledge of public speaking or booking a venue.
(You can learn many skills faster than conventional education and training programs think you can, but the difference between someone with a little practice and education vs someone who is just winging it is usually apparent.)
The packaging of a meetup is all the things that aren’t the people meeting up. Was the announcement text clear? Was it easy to find the event, and was the greeter welcoming? If there was food, was it well laid out where people could find it and for larger crowds somewhere people could move smoothly? Was the venue comfortable and clean, or dingy and missing places to sit?
Terrible packaging can ruin a meetup just like terrible packaging ruins a TV that gets busted in transit. When you’re looking back at how an event went, instead of thinking of some parts as “not really part of the meetup” consider if instead they’re part of the packaging.
Perfect packaging cannot save a meetup with no payload (imagine a beautiful lecture hall with no lecturer!) but some meetups have less emphasis on payload than others. A pure social event is one example; it fails if the payload is terrible (say, if all the other attendees are obnoxious) but is more likely to be affected by the packaging.
This is the packaging and the payload.
V.
It’s worth splitting packaging and payload, and this is often one of the easiest divisions to make in an organization.
A producer and a director. A pastor and a deacon.[2] A sales team and an engineering team. It’s a good system.
Part of this is there’s a specialization difference. Someone who is good at making sure all the emails with questions gets answered and the ticket sales balanced against the budget might be very different from the kind of person who is good at teaching a room full of people or entertaining a crowd. Pick your favourite famous musician; I’d be very surprised if they handled their venue bookings directly.
Part of this is because payloads, especially in events, tend to benefit from not getting distracted. If there’s a problem with the registration desk, you do not want to interrupt the person giving the keynote speech to ask them about it. When I run a small meetup trying to teach something, frustratingly often someone asks where the bathroom is or whether we’re out of pencils in the middle of the instructions. It’s at times like that I wish I had someone just focused on the packaging. Last time I ran a big meetup with a speaker, I wound up having to handle logistical issues in the middle of the Q&A. Fortunately, that didn’t interrupt anything, since the speaker was the payload, not me.
What’s your payload? And what’s your packaging for it?
There are two parts to the packaging that you have mentioned:
optimizing transport (not breaking the TV) is practical and involves everything but the receiver
enhancing reception (nice present wrapping) is cultural and involves the receiver(s)