Coworking Values Podcast

About Coworking Values Podcast

Welcome to Coworking Values the podcast of the European Coworking Assembly. Each week we deep dive into one of the values of accessibility, community, openness, collaboration and sustainability. Listen in to learn how these values can make or break Coworking culture.

Publisher

Bernie J Mitchell

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Nov 2018

Latest episode

27 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

262 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Oct 2026

   Brain-first Coworking spaces with Amanda Perry

   Brain-First Coworking Spaces with Amanda Perry Brain First Workspaces: What Neurodivergent Members Need From Your Space What a curry, a Bluetooth headset and a missing front door taught one founder about designing coworking spaces that more people can use. Want the short version by email? Grab the free five-day email course, 5 Mistakes That Hollow Out a Coworking Community and What to Do Instead, at thecoworkingvaluespodcast.com (https://thecoworkingvaluespodcast.com). Episode Summary Amanda Perry booked a coworking desk in a hurry, without researching the space. What she got was someone reheating leftover curry beside her, a woman pacing past on an aggressive recruitment call through a Bluetooth headset, and a set of phone booth rules that changed depending on who was asking. She wrote about it on LinkedIn. Around 165 comments later, Bernie found her, and the conversation that followed is this episode. Amanda is the founder of Brain First, a platform for neurodivergent founders and leaders, and the author of Brain First Business. Her argument is straightforward. Plenty of late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults spent decades masking, telling themselves to get over it, and assuming the problem was them. Learning how your brain is wired changes that. You stop treating your needs as a character flaw and start building accommodations around them: an extra ten minutes to travel, checking the route on Google Maps before you leave, needing certainty about where you will sit. Then the question flips to the space. Most coworking operators are not trying to exclude anyone. They simply have never had the sensory and communication detail written down. A London space Amanda tried to use had no signage on the door. She could not find the entrance, arrived dysregulated, stressed and sweaty, and never went back. A different app, Worksee, takes you right to the door of the workspace, and she rates it for exactly that reason. The most useful idea in the episode is the drop curb. Designers built kerb cuts for wheelchair users in 1940s America. Now mums with prams, delivery drivers and cyclists rely on them. Design for the edges, and everyone benefits. Amanda is not asking for a space built for every single brain. She is asking for enough variety: quiet in the morning, energy and conversation in the afternoon. Her survey found that 44% of respondents named hot desking as the thing that stopped them trying coworking, or put them off once they had. If you run a space and want more people through the door, welcomed, and staying longer, this is a commercial conversation. Start with the detail you have never written down. Timeline Highlights Amanda's hellish coworking experience. Someone reheating leftover curry beside her, a woman pacing on an aggressive recruitment call through a Bluetooth headset, and 20 minutes in the phone booth that stretched if nobody else wanted it. Booking without research. Amanda booked the desk in a hurry. The mismatch between what she needed and what she got is the whole problem in miniature. The LinkedIn post. Around 165 comments. Bernie found Amanda through it, and the response is its own evidence that this experience is common. Late diagnosis and a lifetime of masking. Neurodivergent adults told themselves to get over it long before anyone explained how their brain was wired. Accommodations that look small and are not. An extra ten minutes to travel, a route checked on Google Maps, certainty about where you will sit. Knowing your wiring turns these into sensible adjustments. Worksee and the missing door. An app that walks you to the workspace door, versus a London space with no signage where Amanda arrived dysregulated, stressed and sweaty, and wrote the space off. Clarity of communication is the accommodation. The information a space publishes about arrival, rules and layout does more work than most operators realise. The drop curb. Built for wheelchair users in 1940s America, used now by prams, delivery drivers and cyclists. Design for the edges and everyone benefits. Not perfection, variety. Quiet in the morning, energy and chat in the afternoon. Enough range that different brains can find their hour. The survey's 44%. Respondents who named hot desking as the thing that put them off coworking, or stopped them trying it at all. Hot desking and the need for certainty. A colleague supporting neurodivergent students describes absolute chaos and meltdowns. Amanda compares it to being seated mid-room in a restaurant. Dean at the Juicy roundtable. A design-led view that good design should be the standard, against Amanda's point that everything around the design makes the difference. The commercial case. More people through the door, welcomed, and retained longer. The Curry, the Headset and the Rule Nobody Wrote Down Start with the scene, because the scene is the argument. Amanda booked a desk quickly, without checking much. Within a short time she had someone reheating leftover curry next to her, a woman pacing past while running an aggressive recruitment call through a Bluetooth headset, and a phone booth with a 20-minute limit that could stretch (or not) depending on who was asking. None of that is malice. It is an unmanaged sensory environment plus rules that live in someone's head instead of on a wall. The reader who runs a space should read that list and recognise how much of it would be cheap to fix: where the kitchen reheating happens, where calls are taken, and whether the booth rules are printed or improvised. Amanda wrote it up on LinkedIn. Around 165 comments came back. If you are an operator wondering whether this matters to enough people to act on, that thread is your answer. Why Late Diagnosis Changes What People Ask For Plenty of neurodivergent adults are diagnosed late, after years of assuming the friction was personal. The phrase Amanda uses is people telling themselves to get over it. That habit is hard to unlearn, and it is why so many members never ask for anything. Diagnosis gives them language. Once you know how your brain is wired, accommodations stop looking like special treatment. An extra ten minutes to travel is not indulgence; it is the difference between arriving regulated and arriving wrecked. Checking the route in advance is not fussiness. Wanting certainty about where you will sit is not a demand. The practical consequence for a space is this: the people who need the most clarity are usually the least likely to ask for it. Waiting for members to tell you what they need guarantees you will hear from the confident few. What a Missing Door Cost, and What a Good Sign Would Have Saved Amanda names Worksee, an app that takes you right to the workspace door, and praises it for that single function. Then she describes the opposite: a London coworking space with no signage on the entrance. She could not find the door, arrived dysregulated, stressed and sweaty, and will never use that space again. That is a lost member, a lost referral and a lost review, caused by a sign. Clarity of communication is the cheapest accessibility work available to any operator, and it happens before anyone walks in. Write down what a first-time visitor needs: the exact entrance, the buzzer, what to do when they arrive, where to sit...

2. 

   15 Oct 2026

   From a Thousand Spaces to a Movement with Thilo Utke

   Go to the Coworking Values Podcast (https://coworkingvaluespodcast.com) website for the free five-day email course, The Five Biggest Mistakes Coworking Community Builders Make and How to Avoid Them — peer-to-peer stories from the trenches drawn from this podcast, one practical action each day. Episode Summary "We are a movement, not just an industry. It's still true. And I think we just got more powerful and also more grown up." Thilo Utke can name the moment coworking grew up. He was there for it. In 2010 he and Alex started with a coworking space, then built the software to run it because nothing else did the job. That software is Cobot. Sixteen years on, the people who made it are paying members of Workish, a neighbourhood space in Berlin that runs on their own product. Bernie opens with the thing that matters: this "isn't brought to you by Cobot. It's just a really nice, interesting story." The occasion is a homecoming. Thilo is flying to Coworking Canada at the end of October, his first time back in a decade. The last time was 2016, in Montreal, the same city. The two of them read an old blog post from that trip and ask what aged well. The numbers from Carsten at Deskmag aged well. But the line that carried then still carries now. Tony Bacigalupo, one of the pioneers, said it in a speech: we are a movement, not just an industry. Thilo's verdict a decade later is the whole thesis in one breath. It's still true. And we just got more powerful and also more grown up. When Bernie presses him on what "powerful" means, the answer is precise. Coworking "already succeeded." The idea that the workplace is fluid, not static, has been picked up by the real estate industry. You now have flex office. The expectation that a workplace is more than the tools around it, a place inside an ecosystem, is the idea winning. In a world where you need resources to push your ideas forward, that's what power looks like. Bernie gives it a local shape. COVID forced people to stay in their neighbourhoods, and the spaces followed them. London used to cluster its coworking in Zone 1 and Zone 2, around Old Street. Now spaces sit in Zones 4, 5 and 6. If someone had proposed opening one there in 2016, "everyone would've looked like you were mad." What follows is an episode about that growing up. Not a teenage phase, Thilo insists — that would be disrespectful. "Forceful youth. Student protests and big ideals and lots of energy to fight." Now it's settled, hit with reality in some way or another, and the speaker list has started asking how to pass it on to the next generation. This is for the operator wondering whether the values that started all this can survive its success, and for the community manager who suspects nobody sees the job they actually do. The answer sits in the way Thilo ends: the next generation "keeps yourself a little bit on your toes. Don't get too comfortable." Timeline Highlights [00:04] Bernie's cold open from Vigo: "Sorry, I've been away eating too much cheesecake, having a sabbatical, whatever you want to call it, but we're back now and shinier than ever." [01:01] The true subject: "Thilo and I take a little trip down memory lane, remembering when there was only about 1,000 coworking spaces in the world and Instagram was a brand-new thing." [01:52] Bernie on why the email course matters: "One of the things people always say is, I thought it was just me... a kind of find the others of coworking mistakes." [02:20] Thilo, asked what he wants to be known for: "I always introduce myself as Thilo from Cobot... building that software and providing it to spaces so that they can run a coworking space more easily... that we have been around, that we will be around." [02:53] Bernie's founding memory: "It was in 2008 when I found Tony and New Work Cities on meetup.com." Cobot itself started in 2010. [03:24] The homecoming: "It was in 2016. I went personally... So it's a 10-year anniversary." The same city, Montreal. [03:55] The monster line, quoting Tony Bacigalupo: "We are a movement, not just an industry. It's still true. And I think we just got more powerful and also more grown up." [04:34] What "powerful" means: coworking "already succeeded... the workplace is not something static but fluid has been picked up by the real estate industry. You now have flex office." [05:38] COVID's effect, in London's geography: spaces once clumped in "Zone 1 and Zone 2 and around Old Street," now "there's like [Zones] 6, 5, and 4." Opening one there in 2016, "everyone would've looked like you were mad." [06:42] Thilo refuses the teenage framing: "That would be disrespectful for the movement to say it's like a teenager... Forceful youth. Student protests and big ideals and lots of energy to fight." [07:27] Bernie's hospitality analogy for community managers: once a job "you got while you were at college... like a job in a bar or a restaurant, but there's actually a lot more to that role because of all the plates you have to hold." [09:43] The Trello and Google Docs memory, from Coworking Europe in Dublin, 2017. Bernie and Phil ran their Euston space on spreadsheets until Inga ended the debate: "I don't think you can possibly run a building these days without software. Like you're mad to even be having this conversation." [11:28] Thilo on why Cobot's team are members at Workish: "It's a nice dog-fooding experience... They're forced to be on the member part, which is also very good to reveal blind spots." [11:52] Workish, described: a "neighbourhood owner-operated coworking space... centred around a maker and creative community," with a coding school, smaller offices, a nice backyard and a maker lab. "You care for your stuff you built when you see it every day." [13:31] Alex, the co-founder who "got really into hardware," in the maker lab, building speakers and "adjusting his keyboard." [17:41] The closing turn, toward Shared Futures: "How coworking can tie in with the social challenges we are facing. And they have not become less, they have become more." Coworking "has become more important, not less." [22:04] The Rosie moment. Thilo: "She's the one who writes a lot of content and we would be so screwed without her because I'm not the best writer." Bernie, on her output: "I have to go and see my therapist. It's so good." [22:23] The last word, unprompted: "Well, it's the next generation, bro. This keeps yourself a little bit on your toes. Don't get too comfortable." The Problem: The Idea Already Won Coworking succeeded, and the success is the problem nobody wants to name. Thilo says it plainly: the idea that work is fluid, not pinned to a fixed desk, has been picked up by the real estate industry. Flex office is the idea, adopted and renamed. Where the early operators fought to be seen as different from hotels and corporate property, those same players now speak the language fluently. When your vocabulary gets borrowed, the moat is gone for anyone who thought the moat was the words. For the independent operator, the risk is real: the wave that adopted your language can also outspend you on the sign above the door. What cannot be copied is the thi...

3. 

   15 Oct 2026

   What's ahead for the rest of 2026

   What's next for Coworking Values Podcast (https://coworkingvaluespodcast.com) - the next few months. Back in May we ran Unreasonable Connection, a London Coworking Assembly event, and introduced the patronage work. It threw up a disconnect: am I supporting the Coworking Values Podcast, or am I supporting the London Coworking Assembly? So we're leading with the Coworking Values Podcast and Unreasonable Connection event, and London Coworking Assembly (https://londoncoworkingassembly.com/) is a newsletter and yearly event under the podcast umbrella and European Coworking Assembly (https://coworkingassembly.eu/). The events. Unreasonable Connection will happen four times in 2027. Three cities are already lined up, and we're looking for a fourth. Plus four online events across the same year, kicking off with one online event in November. The whole point is people getting together and talking to each other. No star speakers. Everything stays connected and community focused. The move. The London Coworking Assembly URL now redirects to the Coworking Values Podcast (https://coworkingvaluespodcast.com/) - we're still fixing a few things! The publishing. Twice a week, a combination of essays and podcasts. This is not a customer acquisition podcast, and it's not best in class with seamless integrations. It's a conversation about hyper-local leadership and third places, the cost of living crisis, economic inclusion, the neurodivergent experience, and coworking as a civic and social force. The frame. You'll hear me quoting Robert Putnam a lot. He wrote Bowling Alone, and he has three instructions: go young, go local, go morality. The people who will rebuild what we're doing aren't here yet. They're walking through your door for the first time. Change never arrives as national policy. It bubbles up from the people walking up and down your high street, the ones you bump into in the supermarket, in the park, in your café. And the morality bit, which Putnam explains far more elegantly than I can, is that we have obligations to each other, not just to ourselves. Coworking has always been sold as a service. It has never been just desks and wifi. Your neighbourhood coworking space is gold dust for connecting the neighbourhood, and doing something much bigger than helping you earn a living and build a business. Where to go next There's a five-day email course on the site: the five biggest mistakes that hollow out a coworking community, and what to do instead. A lot of you who've been on this podcast are already in that sequence. It's a small declaration and manifesto, and it'll be valuable to you. One More Thing Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices. Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability, the values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow. We hope this resonates with you, so please rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities. Community is the key 🔑

Who has been a guest on Coworking Values Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Helena Norberg-Hodge
• Vibushan Thirukumar
• Tom Ball
• Fiona Ross
• Olivia Jones

Podcast Authority Score: 63 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

95

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

76

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