Collaboration a Team Can Feel in Their Hands.

Teams are told to collaborate. Very few are ever given the experience of actually doing it. Silos, hybrid working and back-to-back calls have left colleagues who have never been in rhythm with one another in any literal sense, and the gap shows up as friction, slow decisions and a culture people describe as polite rather than close.

The Experience

Every participant gets a djembe. No musical ability is required and none is assumed. Doug leads the room from its first tentative note to a single, unmistakable groove, and the journey there is the lesson: listening before playing, holding your own part while the person next to you holds theirs, noticing the moment the whole thing locks. Groups of up to three thousand can work in sub-groups on complementary rhythms before being brought together in a plenary. It is the most primal communication technology there is, and it does in forty minutes what a workshop on collaboration rarely does in a day.

The Transformation

Silos come down because they cannot survive the exercise. People leave emotionally connected, with a shared reference point they keep using long afterwards, and with the direct physical memory of what high performance feels like from the inside. It is the foundation a high-performing team is built on, laid in a single session.

Making It Happen

An ideal conference breakout, offsite centrepiece or main-stage finale. Doug brings the instruments. Fifteen to ninety minutes, for groups from ten to three thousand, live or hybrid. The program runs as one block or as three or four shorter sessions across a day. Available in English or French.

Turning Insight Into Operating Habit.

A keynote changes how a room feels. A workshop changes how it works on Monday. This is the longer form for leadership teams and intact groups who want the From Me To We™ Method taken apart, understood and built into how they actually operate.

The Experience

Doug works the three steps of the Method in sequence and in depth. Awareness of self, where people name what they bring and what they withhold. Awareness of others, where they do the work of genuinely knowing the person they have sat beside for years. Collective synergy, where the group practises holding its own parts and locking together, with the drums used as the fastest available teacher. Between each step the group translates what just happened into its own language: the meeting that goes badly, the handover that keeps failing, the colleague nobody has asked a real question of. Doug has run this with more than five hundred organizations and has taught at IMD every year since 2002, so the facilitation is as developed as the content.

The Transformation

The group leaves with a shared vocabulary, a set of agreed operating habits of its own making, and the memory of having performed as one rather than the theory of it. The Method is endorsed in IMD’s book Mastering Executive Education, and the villages of West Africa that taught it to Doug remain its proof: almost none of the advantages a Western organization would list, and not one loneliness problem among them.

Making It Happen

Half a day, or split across an offsite. Best for leadership teams, intact departments and groups of ten to two hundred, live or hybrid. Scoped with you in advance around the outcomes you need. Available in English or French.