Doug Manuel

Keynotes

. FROM ME TO WE™ - THE KEYNOTE: The Cure for the Loneliness Epidemic

Loneliness is the defining condition of modern working life, and it does not stay at home. It walks into the building every morning. From Me To We™ is not a talk about connection. It is connection, built live, in front of the room. It opens with Doug’s own story, told without softening. Then the room gets up and works through the three steps of the methodology, closing with the whole room holding a piece of music that none of them could hold alone. No instruments are needed, which is why it works in an auditorium, in rows, at any scale. Nobody is asked to perform, and nobody is left out, which is the entire point.

Thirty to seventy-five minutes. Ten to five thousand people. In person or virtual. English or French.

FROM ME TO WE™ - THE DRUMS: Collaboration a Team Can Feel in Their Hands

You can tell a team to collaborate. You cannot tell them what it feels like. Ten, five hundred, or three thousand people each receive a djembe, and within minutes they are listening before contributing, holding their own part while somebody else takes the lead, and noticing the instant a voice goes missing. Not one of them needs to have played before. Doug teaches the rhythms with the voice first, so by the time the drums come into it, the room is not learning music, it is recognizing something it already knew. Instruments are hired locally, delivered the day before and collected the day after, never on show day. Doug handles the logistics end to end.

Fifteen to ninety minutes. Ten to three thousand people. English or French.

Workshops

A keynote moves a room. A workshop changes how it works on Monday.

FROM ME TO WE™ - The Workshop

The Workshop is the half-day for the teams that actually have to live with each other. Smaller groups, more time, and the collaboration practices worked through properly rather than demonstrated from a stage. Every workshop is built from scratch, from the client’s brief, which decides the shape of the session, the group sizes, and whether there are drums in the room at all.

Teams map where their own communication actually breaks down, which is rarely where the org chart says it does. They practice the listening work inside their real working groups rather than with a friendly stranger, and they leave with something written down that they have agreed to do differently, authored by them rather than handed to them, which is the only kind of commitment that survives contact with a normal week.

This workshop is frequently booked alongside a keynote: the keynote for the whole conference, the workshop the next morning for the leadership team.

Half a day. Ten to two hundred people. In person or online, with or without drums. English or French.

Immersive Retreats

For leadership teams that want the work taken all the way. Doug hosts small groups in southern Senegal, in the villages he has been returning to for thirty years and where he keeps a home. These communities have almost none of what a Western organization would call an advantage, and not one of them has a loneliness problem. Teams live inside that for several days, with the From Me To We™ work threaded throughout it.

OUTCOMES:

•     A room that has actually connected, rather than been told to.

•     Empathy moved off the values wall and into something two colleagues have

just done.

•    Trust built the only way it is built, by knowing someone.

•     Collaboration experienced in the body, so the team has a shared reference point they keep using.

•     A simple daily practice that survives the flight home and still works on Monday.

Testimonials

“Doug drove an audience of over 600 people to team up and achieve what seemed totally impossible to every one of them before.”

Michel Clement, Senior Director, Oracle

One of a kind: inspiring, participative, informative, and above all authentic. The perfect prelude for my first Executive Leaders Meeting.”

Klaus Peter Feld, Senior Vice President HR, BMW Group

“The best speaker so far.”

Group HR lead, Carlsberg