Is your company in two places at once?

It seems as if you can't be in two places at the same time. But you can be, really. Your body and mind can be light years apart, or your brain can be in one reality while your heart is somewhere else. The same is true for business. Companies are always in two places at once: yesterday, where things were familiar, and tomorrow, where the unknown creates anxiety and, ideally, enthusiasm for the journey ahead.

This is a major theme for a lot of our clients as they learn to accept that what worked in the past doesn't necessarily work now, at least not the way it once did. The workforce is often in two places at once, though the split between work and life is being blurred. Customers are in two places at once. Sometimes they may be your competitors, other times, they may be your collaborators. Getting accustomed to these new, shifting ecosystems is giving everyone vertigo.

Even those of us who don't want to admit it.

If you think the last few years have been dizzying, the next few are going to be whiplash inducing, and I'm increasingly convinced that there's only really one way around it: becoming a learning organization.

A learning organization is an organization with a culture that:

• continuously promotes and fosters learning
• embraces experimentation and the inevitability of failure
• keeps the focus on course correcting in real time
• shares knowledge to prevent repetition of the same mistakes
• builds on what has been learned

This is true for companies, for families, and for all of us as individuals. All we can do is keep learning and correcting our mistakes.

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