Designing Events That Stick
🎧 Listen to Designing Events That Stick – with Jenny Sauer-Klein, Founder and CEO of The Primary Shift
As teams become more distributed and work becomes more transactional, the need for intentional connection has never been greater. Yet most company events fail to create real engagement or lasting impact. The agenda looks good on paper, but the experience feels flat.
In this episode of The Intelligence Amplifiers, host Marko Gargenta sits down with Jenny Sauer-Klein, Founder and CEO of The Primary Shift and The Culture Conference, to explore how to design meaningful events that drive connection, trust, and culture.
From her beginnings as a circus performer and AcroYoga founder to designing transformative experiences for companies like Airbnb, Autodesk, and Google, Jenny brings a unique lens to the craft of event design. She shares why most gatherings fall short, how to create emotional flow instead of just following a schedule, and why human connection is the foundation of any successful experience.
Whether you’re planning your next offsite or designing team experiences at scale, this episode offers practical tools and inspiration to make every moment count.
🔍 What You’ll Learn About Designing High-Impact Events
✅ Connection Before Content
Jenny explains that most events are overstuffed with content and underpowered on connection. Her philosophy is simple: start by building trust and emotional safety, then layer in information. When people feel safe and connected, they are more open to learning, collaborating, and taking action.
This reframing changes how agendas are built and how facilitators lead. Rather than rushing through slides, the goal becomes creating space for reflection, dialogue, and transformation.
✅ The Dramatic Arc of Experience Design
Jenny introduces her signature framework, the Dramatic Arc, which guides the emotional pacing of a powerful event. Similar to storytelling, great experiences have a clear opening, build momentum, hit a climax, and end with meaningful closure.
This approach helps teams remember and internalize what they experienced, not just what was said. It also creates a sense of psychological safety by honoring human rhythms, not just business agendas.
✅ Lessons From the AcroYoga Movement
Before her work in corporate culture, Jenny co-founded AcroYoga and scaled it to 60 countries. She draws on that experience to show how intentional structure and embodied learning can build global communities.
Her facilitation methods prioritize presence, participation, and play. These same principles are now used by her corporate clients to energize leadership retreats, team summits, and culture-building experiences.
✅ How to Scale Intimacy in Large Groups
One of the biggest challenges in team gatherings is scale. Jenny shares tactics for maintaining intimacy even in groups of hundreds. From curated small-group exercises to narrative prompts and guided storytelling, she reveals how to activate participation across diverse audiences.
She also explains why people need more than just inspiration. They need time to integrate what they’ve learned and make it personal.
✅ Designing Events That Reflect Company Culture
Every event is an opportunity to embody your values. Jenny breaks down how to align event design with your organization’s mission, culture, and goals. This means being thoughtful about everything from language and tone to pacing and space design.
She believes great gatherings are not just a break from work. They are a reflection of how your company operates and what it prioritizes.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode
If you’re designing company events, team offsites, or any experience meant to bring people together, this episode with Jenny Sauer-Klein will reshape how you think about structure, flow, and emotional resonance.
From startup founders to enterprise HR leaders, anyone responsible for culture and connection will walk away with practical insights for making events more meaningful.
🎧 Listen to Designing Events That Stick
Want more from Jenny?
Jenny also led a powerful live session with the TechKnowCon community on how to design events that drive connection, engagement, and behavior change. She walked through her Dramatic Arc Event Template and shared actionable tools for turning team gatherings into transformational experiences.
📌 Watch the full session here:
The Experience Design Accelerator – with Jenny Sauer-Klein
