In this episode of “Accessible Disruption,” hosts Anthony Vade and Tahira Endean speak with Jenny Sauer-Klein about her career in making change accessible and appealing. Jenny shares how she first disrupted the traditional yoga world with AcroYoga, a practice she co-founded that combines yoga, acrobatics, and Thai massage. She contrasts the somber, individualistic nature of traditional yoga conferences with AcroYoga’s exuberant, playful, and community-based approach. The practice was designed to reward strength as well as flexibility and emphasize that “we can do more together than we can alone”.

Jenny explains that pioneering AcroYoga required overcoming participants’ initial fears and limiting beliefs. The key was building trust and confidence through gradual, incremental steps and creating psychological safety. She used playful, non-acrobatic icebreakers to build rapport, enabling strangers to feel safe enough to try more risky physical movements together. Jenny later applied these values of trust, connection, and playfulness to the corporate world through “The Culture Conference”. She also discusses the difficult decision to leave AcroYoga, which taught her the importance of letting go of projects and following what is “most alive”.

The conversation focuses on Jenny’s latest project, the “conference for conferences,” which aims to disrupt boring, disembodied corporate events. She criticizes the standard “flat line” conference model, keynotes, breakout workshops, fireside chats, and panels, as a passive “sit and listen” experience. Instead, she advocates for minimizing information dissemination and maximizing the collaborative, interactive potential of in-person gatherings. She details her “Primary Shift” framework, which involves identifying where an audience is starting “from” and where the event needs to take them “to”. Jenny encourages event organizers to be transparent with audiences when experimenting and to create “brave spaces” where both presenters and attendees can take risks together.