Last week I sat down to dinner with a table of coworkers - most I knew well; some I’d mostly knew as a little square on a video call. You know the energy I’m talking about: polite, a little careful, everyone figuring out how much of themselves to bring to the table along with their entree.
Now, despite being a community manager - I’m also very much an introvert who sometimes has no social energy left by dinner and finds myself retreating into the abyss (or my fancy plated chicken). I know I need to do better - and lucky for me I have people skills and community manager skills.
Finally there was an over extended lull in the conversation, and I said “Some of us were debating this earlier. When does a muffin stop being a muffin and start being a cupcake?”
My boss gave one of his quizzical looks (fortunately at the question; not me - phew) and my boss’ boss blurted out “frosting, of course”. And then the table was at it. “No, it’s the size!”, “No, sugar content!”, “I think it’s the icing!” - back and forth, back and forth. Finally every opinion had been shared and we had fairly reached a settlement of frosting with the definitive example being the muffins shared with lunch earlier that had been tiny and NOT frosted.
“Ok, next question!” someone piped up.
So, I asked another one (“Is a hot dog a sandwich?”). Then another (“What is the difference between a ship and a boat?”). By the third question, people were asking for the next one before the last argument had even wrapped up.
That’s when my boss leaned back and said, “Waiittt... did you just go all community manager on us? Is this what you do to get strangers to talk to each other?”
Busted. Kind of. Yes.
I love these questions for their own sake (I will die on the frosting hill, for the record). But I wasn’t only making conversation. I was observing. Well, “observing” makes me sound like I had a clipboard under the table. Noticing. Let’s go with noticing.
Who jumps in first? Who waits to see where the room lands before committing? Who disagrees loudly and laughs while they do it, and who gets a little tight around the eyes? Who appoints themselves judge and starts inventing a scoring rubric for baked goods? Who keeps the thing going by turning to the person who hasn’t said anything yet?
Ten minutes of muffin discourse told me more about how that group handles disagreement than a quarter’s worth of meetings would have. In a meeting, disagreement costs something. Someone’s project, someone’s budget, someone’s credibility. At dinner, nobody’s reputation rides on cupcake taxonomy, so people show you how they argue when the stakes are zero. And how a group argues at zero is a pretty good preview of how it’ll argue when the stakes go up.
The other thing: people stopped being titles. Hierarchy absolutely did not count when discussing if hot dogs should absolutely be classified as tacos.
The nonsense is where a group learns it’s safe to disagree with each other.
Community folks have been running this exact play for years, usually without giving ourselves much credit for it.
Every community I’ve worked on has had some version of the off-topic space. The #random channel. The Friday “what are you drinking” thread. The pet photos (so many pet photos). And sooner or later, every one of them has had a stakeholder ask (hopefully politely) what that space is for. It’s for this. It’s where members learn each other’s tone, figure out who’s joking, and build up enough goodwill that a sharp reply in a support thread later lands as blunt instead of hostile.
Disagreement needs reps, too. A community whose first public argument is about a pricing change or a deprecated feature is going in cold, with no shared memory of having disagreed and come out fine. Ask the ridiculous question in the forum. Let people pick sides. Let it get a little loud. You’re giving them a track record.
Somebody has to go first, and in most rooms that’s you. Asking about muffins at a work lunch carries a small but nonzero risk of being the weird one at the table. I’ll take it. Absorbing that bit of social risk so everyone else doesn’t have to is a huge part of the job, and it’s the part that never makes it into the job description.
And pay attention to what the nonsense shows you. The person at a table who keeps pulling the quiet guy into the debate? Future welcomer. The one who invented the scoring rubric is going to draft your community guidelines whether you ask them to or not. The low-stakes moments are where your moderators, connectors, and peacekeepers introduce themselves, usually without realizing they’re auditioning.
So yeah… when does a muffin become a cupcake?