Lego Club and coworking

This morning at 8:45 a reminder pinged on my partner’s phone to register our resident 8-year-old for Lego Club at the local library.

If she misses the 9am registration window, Lego Club fills up and people get bumped to the waiting list.

It’s a big deal.

Lego Club happens once a week at the library. Kids get together and build things. The people who run it provide a theme, but the kids are free to do whatever they want with the Legos.

It’s been a standing event on our schedule for more than a year but today something struck me: Why is this event so incredibly popular? Most families have Legos at home—often more than they know what to do with.

So I asked.

And it turns out, the appeal of Lego Club is not so much access to Legos, it’s access to other kids who are also interested in playing with Legos. It’s being part of something. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s also the ritual of going every week, seeing familiar friends and making new ones.

There’s a lot going on in this little Lego Club.

And, it sounds quite a bit like coworking.

As any coworking community builder knows, the most valuable element of coworking is the people. It’s not the wifi, it’s not the fancy amenities, it’s not the ergonomic chairs. Those things are all nice, but in and of themselves, they’re not very interesting.

In coworking, the tools are easy to come by. You can get wifi, good coffee, a desk and an ergonomic chair in lots of places—including home. It’s the community that brings magic to the space. And to the lives of members.

So next time you start obsessing about your amenities, remember the kids who go to Lego Club week in and week out so they can work around other kids and maybe build something amazing in the process.

This is what we’re doing in coworking.

Stay focused.

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Originally published on LinkedIn