Learning Styles Inventory
The Kolb Learning Styles Inventory scores a person against the four-stage learning cycle, showing not their fixed 'type' but which stage of the cycle - experiencing, reflecting, conceptualising, or acting - they habitually skip.
A loop of four stages turns back on itself, showing which one a person leans on and which gets skipped.
Reach for this when…
- Someone keeps jumping straight to doing and skipping the reflective step of learning entirely.
- Training feedback is inconsistent and you suspect a mismatch of format, not content.
- A leader wants language for why some development methods work for them and others don't.
How to run it
- Administer the Kolb LSI questionnaire.
- Score it against the four-stage cycle.
- Debrief the resulting profile.
- Connect the profile to where in the cycle they habitually get stuck.
A worked example
Situation. Pieter van der Merwe leads HR at Bosveld Equipment, a forestry equipment manufacturer in Cape Town, South Africa, where engineering training had become a string of theory-heavy workshops people quietly disengaged from.
Applied. The LSI profile for the engineering team skewed heavily toward Accommodator: strong on doing, weak on reflecting. The debrief showed they were jumping from Concrete Experience straight to Active Experimentation, skipping Reflective Observation almost entirely.
Result. Pieter rebuilt the training format to force a short reflection step - what did we just see, not what do we do next - before any hands-on session. Post-training engagement scores rose within the next quarter.
The catch
The four labels (diverger, converger, assimilator, accommodator) get treated as fixed personality types when they really describe which stage of the cycle someone under-uses right now. The instrument's test-retest reliability is also patchier than most coaches assume, so a single score shouldn't carry too much weight.
The stage someone skips under pressure is the one to build back in, not the one they naturally prefer.
Origin: David Kolb