Doug Manuel

Doug Manuel runs a session in which every person in the room is given a djembe drum and the audience becomes the performance, which is a different proposition from a talk about collaboration.

He founded Sewa Beats in 2000, building programs that combine traditional West African drumming with a corporate learning structure, and he has spent more than twenty-five years living, working and drumming alongside villagers in rural Senegal, where the music and the culture the work draws on come from. That grounding matters, because the alternative version of this format is a novelty percussion exercise with a teamwork slide attached at the end.

The mechanism is worth understanding before booking it. A room of several hundred people learning a rhythm together cannot succeed by individual effort, and it fails immediately and audibly when people stop listening to each other. Nobody has to be told that listening matters or that a group can only move at a shared tempo, because the room demonstrates it to itself in about four minutes. He works with a band of professional musicians on stage, and the pieces the audience plays into are songs they already know, which is what stops the exercise feeling like homework.

His clients include Harvard Business School, the World Economic Forum, LVMH, Google and Oprah, and Sewa Beats programs have reached close to half a million participants over two decades. He created Do You Speak Djembe?, a stage show nominated for a Chicago Jeff Award, and was a BBC documentary producer before this work, a background that shows in how the session is paced.

It is the right booking for a conference that has sat still all day, a merged team meeting for the first time, or an event that needs an ending people talk about afterward. It is not the right booking for an audience that must leave with a framework, and organizations usually place it alongside the analytical sessions rather than in place of them.