Tapari Meetings
An HBR article on meeting management crossed my desk recently. The advice was reasonable. The publication date was 1976. Nearly five decades later, the problems it described are unchanged—we haven’t gotten better at meetings, we’ve just gotten better at scheduling more of them.
37signals famously called meetings toxic. That’s probably too strong, but the frustration is legitimate. Most meetings drain energy without producing proportional value. They run long, include people who didn’t need to be there, and end without clear decisions or ownership. The calendar invite becomes a substitute for actual communication.
So here’s an alternative worth trying: tapari meetings.
What is a tapari meeting?
A tapari is a small roadside tea stall—the kind you find on every street corner in Indian cities. People stop, share a cup of chai, talk about whatever’s on their mind, and move on. No agenda. No presentation. No conference room.
The idea is to bring that energy into the workplace. Instead of booking a room and assembling a slide deck, you walk to the tea machine or step outside with a small group and talk it out over a cup of tea.
Why it works
The most underrated feature is the built-in time limit. A cup of tea lasts roughly five to ten minutes. When the cup is empty, the meeting is over—no timer required, no facilitator enforcing the clock. The format does it naturally.
That constraint forces clarity. When you have ten minutes, you get to the point. You skip the pleasantries, the status recaps, the tangential discussions. You surface the issue, talk it through, and decide. Brevity stops being a virtue you aspire to and becomes a structural reality you can’t avoid.
Attendance becomes honest too. People who don’t need to be part of the conversation simply won’t show up—or wander off when they realise there’s nothing for them here. The informal setting makes it socially acceptable to say “I don’t think I need to be in this one” without it feeling like a slight. That’s a harder thing to do when a calendar invite has already gone out.
There’s also something about informality that lowers defenses. Conversations that feel confrontational in a conference room often flow more naturally when you’re both holding a paper cup and standing near a window. People are more candid when they’re not performing for a room. Difficult things get said sooner, which means they get resolved sooner.
And because there are no minutes to hide behind, decisions stick differently. The conversation was short and concrete, so both people remember what was decided and who owns what. Ambiguity doesn’t survive brevity.
The assumption underneath all of this
Most workplace culture assumes that serious work requires serious structure—desks, meeting rooms, formatted agendas. But some of the most consequential decisions in history happened during informal conversations: heads of state, generals, founders. The formality of the setting had little to do with the quality of the outcome.
What if we stopped conflating structure with seriousness? A focused ten-minute conversation at a tea stall might produce a clearer decision than an hour-long meeting with a twelve-slide deck. The deck creates the appearance of rigour while the real negotiation happens in the corridor afterward.
Teams develop their own communication norms over time. Give people permission to meet informally—outside the calendar, outside the conference room—and they’ll often find more effective ways to coordinate than any meeting framework you could impose on them. The tapari meeting isn’t a framework. It’s the absence of one, and that might be the point.
Next time you’re about to send a calendar invite for something that could be resolved in fifteen minutes, suggest a walk to the tea machine instead. Pay attention to what happens to the quality of the conversation when the room disappears.