Some things can’t be argued for.
They can only be shown.
— Seven Hundred Voices Become One —
Banding Together
Seven hundred people came that day.
It started as a fundraiser — I was trying to raise money to get a film made about my grandad. We brought an old Barton bus onto the pitch, the kind that used to carry us to contests and carnivals on Sunday mornings. People climbed on. Sat in the seats. Looked out of the windows. And went somewhere else for a moment. Somewhere they hadn’t been in twenty-five years.
All day, a playlist ran on the PA — original recordings of songs the bands had played, or danced to at the old CBSL discos. The music had been working on people for hours before we played a single live note. You could feel it. A restlessness in the bones. An identity that hadn’t been extinguished — just dormant.
Waiting.
Then the ensemble came on. I stood at the front, trombone in hand, and introduced what we were going to play. We started playing my grandad's famous arrangement of Spanish Eyes.
And I watched it happen in real time.
A woman in her thirties stood up. Shly. Shoulders dropped, like a kid creeping away from the tuck shop. She started marching. Left-right. Left-right. On her own. For about ten seconds.
Then a girl of about ten — fiery red hair, I can still see her — stood up and started marching too.
Ten seconds after that, people were rushing from all over the stadium.
One of them ran to the car park. She came back with a drum major’s mace. She’d brought it with her. Just in case. Packed it in the boot of her car that morning, not knowing if she’d need it.
She went to the front, mace held high, and led the march.
Because it was already in her. It had never left. It was just waiting for the moment.
They marched and counter-marched — every one of them with either a huge grin or a face full of tears. When the music stopped, the whole place erupted. Cheers and backslaps and people holding each other. Their belonging. Their community. Their soul — back, for the briefest fleeting moment, in this field on a summer’s day.
When Spanish Eyes ended, and the eyes were dried, I called out: "Nev? Where’s Nev? We’re playing La Bamba. Come on up, mate. It’s time to get the dance right."
I should explain Nev.
Nev grew up in the band world. Fifty years of marching and performing and knowing exactly what he was doing. Until the day at a contest in Cromford when he went the wrong way during a Serenaders' two-step dance to the Richie Valens song La Bamba. Backwards when we all went forwards. Forwards when we all went back. For approximately twenty seconds. That felt like about four years. Until he just stopped entirely — just stood still in the middle of the moving band — because he’d calculated that motionlessness was less catastrophic than continuing.
After we came off the arena, my grandad, Moz, took him behind a tree for a 'bollocking'. A grown man, at that time a thirty-year band veteran, and a colleague down at the railway. Behind a tree in a carnival field, because it was the only private place available.
They came back smiling.
My grandad looked at all of us and said: "I should be mad. And part of me is mad. But I can’t stay mad — because I can’t stop laughing."
And he burst out laughing. The biggest, most helpless laugh I ever heard from him. And every pair of shoulders in the band dropped simultaneously.
That was thirty years ago.
Up came Nev to the biggest cheer of the day.
Before I could say a word, my Uncle Dave waved me over. "Can I tell it?"
Dave asking permission. I handed him the mic.
He told the crowd. About the dance. About the tree. About my grandad wanting to be furious — "but me Dad couldn’t. He was too busy laughing". The roar from the crowd. And then I leaned down, gently picked up my grandad’s Serenader hat, and placed it on Nev’s head.
And into La Bamba once again we went...
Two steps forward. Two steps back. This time — perfect.
I hadn’t set out that day to do leadership work. I’d set out to raise money for a film.
But seven hundred people arrived carrying something they hadn’t put down — they’d just stopped letting themselves feel it.
The music gave them permission.
And permission, once it wakes up in a body, doesn’t wait to be told what to do next.
That woman didn’t decide to pack her Drum Major's mace.
She just knew.
“David changed me deeply. I think I changed him too.
And together, the work we did changed and saved lives."
- Dr Tom Manion, CEO, Irwell Valley Housing, UK
"
— A Metal Hut On A Housing Estate —
Ahmed.
Dr Tom Manion called me after about a week.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’d been working with Tom — CEO of Irwell Valley Housing — for some time. Not-for-profit. Social housing. An organisation whose entire reason for existing is to give people somewhere safe to live.
We’d been talking, among other things, about choices. About a concept I’d absorbed from Sir Ken Robinson — the late, brilliant author of ‘The Element’ — the idea that everything changes when you find the crossover point where a person’s talents and passions meet. Their element. And what becomes possible when you help someone see it.
One day Tom took me out to one of their most challenging estates. We met Ahmed in the estate office. A small metal hut. Big metal security shutters, bolted down all around it. The kind of place that tells you something about what the job is like before anyone says a word.
Ahmed hadn’t been at Irwell Valley long. But the job was getting to him. The estate manager had noticed — arriving a little later, a little less present. Tom had noticed too.
Ahmed explained what his days looked like. Every morning: open up the shutters, which often had fresh graffiti on them overnight. Get the office ready. Go out on patrol — looking for things that needed fixing, engaging with residents, trying to hold things together.
"It’s a hard slog, to be honest", he said. "I feel like I’m not making progress. I’m just trying to fix fences and they just get kicked down or sprayed all over."
Tom didn’t hesitate.
"Ahmed, mate. You’re not fixing fences.
You’re building bridges and saving lives."
I watched Ahmed’s face in the moment those words arrived.
His whole world changed. Something opened — like a tap being turned on, like a soul waking up. He shed a tear. Nodded. Gulped.
A week later, the estate manager called Tom.
Ahmed had come in early the very next morning. Keen. Eager. Raring to go. And he’d kept coming in early every day since.
"He whistles now, Tom", said the manager. "Whistles".
Ahmed was voted employee of the year.
Tom had absorbed something from our work together — about the crossover point, about finding the element in people — and given it to Ahmed himself, in one unrehearsed sentence, in a bolted-down metal hut on a housing estate.
That’s what culture change actually looks like. Not a programme. Not a framework. A CEO who has found his own permission — and knows, in the moment, exactly how to hand it to someone else.
Tom’s words about our eighteen months together: "He changed me deeply. I think I changed him too. And together, the work we did changed and saved lives."
He wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
“Your message was real. It was human.
For the first time ever, I felt a spark in my body, my heart, my soul.
What David inspires is very well defined in a single word. Trust.”
- Montse Caballero, Head of Leadership Intelligence, Cisco Systems Europe.
"
— A Warm Evening In Torremolinos —
Montse.
I first met Montse Caballero in a conference room in Lisbon. She was Cisco’s Head of Talent Development and Leadership Intelligence for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia — one of the most credentialled people in the room. I was there to deliver a keynote and a masterclass.
A couple of days later, she called me.
She was tired, she said. Tired of graduate development that ticked boxes. Tired of programmes that treated extraordinarily talented young people as problems to be processed. Something in the keynote had shifted something in her, and she wanted to talk about it properly.
So Paul Edmunds and I flew to Torremolinos. Paul is my long-time collaborator, co-facilitator and friend — the Yin to my Yang, Torvill to my Dean — and between us we have probably redesigned more graduate programmes than we care to count.
We ate tapas and drank Rioja outside on a warm Spanish evening, for three hours, unhurried. I may or may not have bummed a cigarette off Montse. I genuinely can’t remember. It’s probably likely.
And across that table, Montse told me what had happened in that conference room in Lisbon.
"Your message was real", she said. "It was human. It was about our choices and our voices — finding who we really are, understanding how to listen and meet others where they are. For the first time ever, I felt a spark in my body, my heart, my soul that I’d never felt before around organisational development."
She paused.
"It gave me my mojo back".
"That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I want to inspire the graduates the way you inspired me."
So we did.
Out went the PowerPoint slides. The U-shaped classrooms. The chalk and talk. The manuals. We built the programme around re-humanising some of the cleverest young people in the world — people who were brilliant in their heads and had been trained to stay there. We booked out a restaurant and split the graduates into two teams and had them cook dinner together, because nothing teaches you to listen and collaborate and trust like having to produce a meal under pressure. We built in-room performances instead of role plays. We blindfolded groups and asked them to communicate. We created a courtroom to settle divisive arguments — not to find a winner, but to practise the lost art of listening to understand.
By the end of two weeks with us, they were different people. Not because we’d given them techniques. Because they’d found something in themselves they hadn’t known was there.
I’m still friends with over two hundred of those graduates.
Montse’s testimonial says: "What David inspires is very well defined in a single word. Trust".
She’s right. But the trust started with her. She had to find her own permission — to do the work she’d always believed in, the way she’d always wanted to do it — before she could help anyone else find theirs.
That’s how it always works.
“it felt like someone had given me the permission to be my whole self.
This is the most valuable leadership work I have ever had. It's changed my life".
- Telani Meintjes, Graduate, Cisco Systems Europe.
"
Netflix
In 2025, BAND — the documentary film I wrote, directed and produced — beat 17,000 applicants to win the Netflix Documentary Talent Fund Award.
It received it's global premiere at the Raindance International Film Festival in London and has been submitted for a 2026 'Best Short Film' BAFTA nomination.
“an extraordinary story, told in an extraordinary way. Brilliant."
- Commissioning Executive, Original Documentaries, Netflix
"
Some of the organisations I've worked with
Médecins Sans Frontières · Cisco Systems · The BBC · IRC Water · Jaguar Land Rover · Arts Council England · Sky · EasyJet · NFU Mutual · Animals Asia · The Global White Lion Protection Trust · The Wildlife Trust · The Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation · Irwell Valley Housing · Channel 4 · Wellington College · Eton College · +15 UK school Academies ·
If any of this resonates
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