When two divisions merged at Abt Associates, now Abt Global, a ceramic cupcake became an unexpected point of tension.
The smaller division, International Economic Growth — IEG — covered a wide range of work, from climate change and agricultural finance to governance and private-sector development. It also had a long-standing Friday tradition. Each week, one person was passed a ceramic cupcake. That person was responsible for the next Baked Goods Friday: bringing something to share, opening their office or arranging a common space, and sending an invitation to colleagues that morning. Often the invitation was written as a poem. It happened almost without fail, every Friday, for years.
Then IEG merged with Abt's much larger International Health Division. The two groups became part of a single International Development Division, organized regionally rather than around the technical units that had defined people's professional homes for most of their careers.
Former IEG staff continued to host Baked Goods Friday. But they only invited each other.
Some people from Health understandably felt excluded. Others thought the whole thing was a little silly — why did anyone care so much about a ceramic cupcake and a plate of baked goods? I understood why, and it was not really about the baking. The Friday gathering carried something else: intimacy, informality, the sense of belonging to something small enough to know everyone in it. IEG had been a close-knit unit. People knew one another's work, had shared history and shorthand and inside jokes, and had built up years of small traditions along the way.
The merger brought real opportunity — bringing economic development and other sectoral expertise and health expertise together meant we could build more integrated programs and offer stakeholders something neither division could deliver alone. But organizational change is rarely experienced only in terms of what might be gained. People also think about what they stand to lose, and for many long-time IEGers, that included a sense of identity and belonging. The ceramic cupcake became one small way of holding on to it.
At the time, I was serving as the leadership liaison to the change task force supporting the integration. Part of that work was helping leadership understand what people were actually experiencing — not simply whether they supported the new structure on paper, but what sat underneath some of the resistance to it. The cupcake surfaced as one of those things.
I could have decided the tradition was exclusionary and asked people to stop. I could have gone the other way and formalized it into an official division-wide event — invitations to hundreds of people, something scheduled and sanctioned. Either move would have missed the point. The tradition worked precisely because it was informal and human-scale — people stopped by, talked, lingered; someone brought something homemade, or occasionally something picked up on the way to work; the invitation itself could be playful. It was the opposite of a mandatory corporate gathering, and turning it into one would have killed the thing that made it valuable in the first place.
So instead, I had direct conversations with those carrying on the tradition — not a policy announcement, just honest exchanges, mostly over video chats since I was leading remotely at the time. People wanted to keep the intimacy that made the Friday gathering matter, and they didn't want it turned into something large and manufactured. Through the conversations, a solution soon arose: a colleague who had recently hosted mentioned, almost in passing, that she'd already invited one or two people from Health who happened to sit near her that week — not the whole region in which she sat, just the couple of people closest to her desk. It had gone fine; nobody had made a thing of it. That small, unplanned step became the model to build on deliberately: each host would extend the invitation a little further outward, to the people seated nearest them, rather than opening the whole thing up at once.
New people joined a few at a time. More people contributed food. Relationships began forming across what had been separate organizational lines.
It took time, and it was a little awkward at first. Habits that had once felt completely natural had to be reconsidered. People who had never intended to exclude anyone had to recognize that the context around them had changed. People joining the tradition for the first time had to understand they were stepping into something that already carried meaning for others. But the tradition evolved instead of disappearing, and that mattered.
Mergers and restructurings tend to focus on the visible architecture of an organization — reporting lines, budgets, titles, systems, decision rights. All of that matters enormously. But people do not experience an organization only through its org chart. They experience it through accumulated moments of belonging: who stops by whose office, where people gather when they don't have to, which stories get retold, who knows the history behind a joke, what gets celebrated, how newcomers are welcomed, which traditions survive a leadership change and which quietly disappear.
Those things can look trivial from a distance. They are not. They are part of how people answer questions they may never say out loud — do I belong here, are the things I valued before still valued, is there a place for who we were in what we're becoming. That is why traditions deserve real attention during organizational change, rather than being dismissed as sentiment or nostalgia.
That doesn't mean every tradition deserves to survive. Some habits need to change. Some genuinely exclude. Some reflect a culture an organization is trying to leave behind. The useful question isn't whether to preserve a tradition on principle, but what it's actually doing before deciding what to do with it: what need does it meet, what does it signal, what would people believe they were losing if it disappeared. Sometimes the honest answer is to end a practice. Sometimes it's to build something new. And sometimes, as with the cupcake, it's to give people enough room to carry what they value into the new organization and let it change as new people become part of it.
I've thought about that ceramic cupcake many times since. Culture can sound abstract at the organizational level — we write values statements, run employee surveys, debate behaviors and competencies and leadership principles. Those things have their place. But culture also lives much closer to the ground, in the routines, relationships, and small signals that tell people whether this is a place where they belong.
Sometimes, culture is a ceramic cupcake.
© 2026 Michele Laird. All rights reserved.