"The Meeting Before the Meeting": Reading the Room in Bogotá and Cairo

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇪🇬 Egypt

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

An agenda in Bogotá or Cairo is best understood as a polite suggestion rather than a binding document. Both countries are classified by researchers following Edward T. Hall's communication-context framework as high-context cultures, where — per widely cited intercultural research — "what is not said can be as important as what is said." A newcomer fresh from a low-context culture, where meetings exist to make decisions, will spend their first month in either city wondering when the real meeting is going to start, not realizing they are already in it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇪🇬 Egypt

Colombia's business culture, according to trade-delegation guidance from bodies like the US Commercial Service, is shaped by strong regional variation: Bogotá and Medellín run more formally — suits, titles, careful protocol — while coastal cities like Barranquilla and Cartagena operate with more warmth and less ceremony. What holds across the country is the primacy of the relationship: no meaningful business gets transacted without a foundation of personal trust built over shared meals and repeated contact. Meetings themselves tend to open with unhurried small talk — family, football, the traffic — and rushing past that stage is read less as efficiency than as a lack of respect. Hofstede's data places Colombia among the more collectivist nations, with a notably high score on both power distance and what researchers term "in-group loyalty," meaning decisions flow through trusted relationships and hierarchical approval rather than open debate among equals.

Egypt runs on a related but distinct logic. Confirmed meeting times are treated with more flexibility than a Northern European or North American visitor will expect — guidance circulated to UK exporters explicitly notes that visitors should "confirm appointments in advance and never come late, but expect your host may be." Business is conducted through a dense web of personal trust; Egyptians, per widely cited cross-cultural business guidance, prefer to work with people they know, and meetings routinely open with extended hospitality — coffee, tea, genuine conversation — before any commercial matter surfaces. Authority in the room is usually concentrated in one senior figure, even when junior staff are doing the technical talking, and it is that senior figure whose read of the room ultimately determines what happens next, regardless of what the agenda says.

The Reckoning

The surface similarity — both high-context, both relationship-first, both allergic to rushing — masks a real difference in how disagreement gets signaled. In Colombian business culture, a soft "vamos a ver" (we'll see) or enthusiastic-sounding vagueness is frequently a polite no; Colombians tend to avoid direct confrontation, so warmth in the room is not a reliable predictor of the eventual answer. In Egyptian business culture, disagreement is more often expressed through delay and deferral to a senior figure than through verbal softness — a proposal that keeps getting rescheduled or redirected upward is the actual answer, even if everyone in the room remained warm and hospitable throughout.

Both cultures will therefore frustrate the same kind of newcomer — the one who reads a friendly meeting as a "yes in progress" — but for different diagnostic reasons. In Bogotá, listen for what's not being said directly. In Cairo, watch who the decision keeps getting deferred to, and how many times.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A consultant who worked opposite Egyptian counterparts for several years wrote that the real signal of interest wasn't verbal at all — it was whether a senior figure personally joined the second meeting. If they didn't show up themselves, the deal typically wasn't moving forward, however positive the junior staff sounded.

r/expats — An American who relocated to Bogotá for a regional sales role described spending his first two months chasing what he thought were near-closed deals, before realizing that "vamos a ver" from a Colombian counterpart almost always meant no, just delivered without the discomfort of saying so directly.

InterNations Cairo — A European project manager noted that meetings scheduled for an hour routinely ran two, and that trying to enforce the original time slot in his first few months was quietly read as impatience rather than professionalism.

HackerNews — A remote-first startup founder who hired a small Bogotá-based team observed that async written communication worked far worse than expected — decisions that looked confirmed in Slack kept unwinding until they'd also been discussed on a video call, which he eventually concluded was where the actual trust-building happened.

r/AskMiddleEast — A British expat working in Cairo described learning, after a frustrating first quarter, to always ask "who else needs to be comfortable with this?" rather than "who approves this?" — a small phrasing shift that surfaced the real decision-maker far faster than the org chart did.

Conclusion

If you are moving into a Colombian or Egyptian office from a culture where meetings are decision-making machines, recalibrate your expectations of what a meeting is actually for: in both places, it is primarily a trust-verification ritual, and the decision itself happens elsewhere — over the follow-up lunch in Bogotá, through the senior figure's attention in Cairo. Budget real time for this; it is not a delay you can engineer around with a tighter agenda. The line I'd give a friend headed to either city: stop counting how many meetings it took to get a yes, and start counting how many meals.