Kolb Learning Styles
Kolb's cycle says real learning runs through four stages - concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation - and most people have a strong preference that quietly skips one or two.
The cycle loops through four stages, each feeding the next, from doing through to trying again.
Reach for this when…
- Training keeps being delivered one way and it lands with only some of the room.
- Someone jumps straight from a mistake to a new action without ever reflecting.
- A team over-analyses and never gets to trying anything.
How to run it
- Administer a learning style inventory to reveal dominant style: Diverging, Assimilating, Converging, Accommodating.
- Explain the cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation.
- Help the person identify which stage of the cycle they underuse.
- Design a learning activity that deliberately strengthens that stage.
- Return to the cycle in later work to check the gap has closed.
A worked example
Situation. Liam Carter led learning and development at a bank in Adelaide, Australia, where branch managers kept repeating the same customer-service mistakes despite regular training.
Applied. The inventory showed most managers were strongly Accommodating - fast into action, weak on reflection - so he built in a short structured debrief after each incident before any retraining.
Result. The same complaint types dropped over the following two quarters, not because the training changed but because managers finally paused long enough to notice the pattern.
The catch
The inventory sorts people into a dominant style but real learning usually needs all four stages regardless of preference, so a style label can become an excuse ('I'm not a reflector') rather than a stage to strengthen. It also measures self-reported preference, not actual capability, and the four-style typology is looser than it looks on the page.
A learning style is a habit, not a limit. The point of naming it is to work the stage you skip, not to avoid it.
Origin: David Kolb