Engaging people in meaningful discussion in your meetings, retreats, Town Halls or offsites isn’t easy. One of the biggest challenges is gaining, and then keeping people’s attention long enough to have a useful dialogue and build the commitment you need to make change happen.

Think back to some of the meetings you’ve attended. Remember the one where you were so bored your greatest creative stretch was figuring out how to yawn without someone noticing? How about that one where you were barraged by speakers and animated PowerPoint slides that you started to tune out and check your phone after the first 5 minutes? Or do you remember the strategic offsite you went to where you worked really hard but felt like you had been hit by a truck at the end of the day, and struggled to remember what you talked about before lunch?

My philosophy when I design and deliver sessions for my clients is that there is brilliance in the room, and it’s crucial to create an environment and agenda where we can tap into the hearts and minds of all participants.  Engaging experiences are designed around energy, not just content. When you engage people, you draw forth their insights, creativity, and commitment to taking action.

Here are my 3 top tips for making your next meeting or event powerful and impactful. These strategies will work, whether you’re planning a team meeting for a handful of people, or a conference for thousands.

1. Build Breathing Room into Your Agenda

While it’s important to make use of the time you have, be careful not to overplan each minute of the agenda. Just like red wine needs some time to aerate to fully release its flavour, good conversation and deliberation needs some breathing space too. Sometimes a comment over the coffee break or having time over lunch to reflect helps spark deeper reflection and insights that can be useful.

Anchor your discussions in the context of WHY this issue matters, and ensure everyone has the opportunity to voice their view about that. If people aren’t bought in on why change may be needed, any potential solutions are likely to falter or fail when it comes to implementation.

When designing your meeting or event, be aware that there are natural peaks and valleys in the group’s energy. You’ll get the most attention and engagement at the beginning of your event, but expect it to drop after a meal or towards the end of the day. Those can be good times to incorporate small group or buddy sharing, or to get folks involved in some kind of kinaesthetic activity like putting their ideas on sticky notes on a wall or completing a pre-designed graphic template together.

2. Create an Environment for Great Ideas and Discussion

Create the environment for people to have meaningful dialogue and experiences with one another. With only 20% of employees reporting that they feel actively engaged in their work, talking at them longer won’t help. Engaging in conversations, developing shared values and experiences, and fostering collaboration and better relationships goes a long way towards helping organizations achieve the outcomes they want. From using ice-breaker exercises so people get to know one another to how you communicate with participants before and after the event, the more you can create an experience, the better your event will be. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

Choose a physical space that supports your work. Think about size, acoustics, lighting, comfort and temperature.  I once worked with a client who had booked a large hotel ballroom for a sensitive conversation with a marginalized segment of the community of about 40 people. That relatively small groups was absolutely dwarfed doing deep, transformative work and brainstorming in this huge space.  The other facilitators and I had to work extra hard and make some physical changes to the space on-site so the room didn’t dampen the group’s energy and sense of connection to each other.

3. Plan for the “What’s Next?”

I believe that information may be interesting, but without action, it’s pretty useless. Reverse-engineer the agenda and participant preparation to the outcomes you want at the end of the day. What needs to be different the day after your meeting or event as a result? What action do you want folks to take? Graphic recordings of the discussions are great not just for capturing the event, but also for fostering ongoing dialogue after the event and to help with implementation.