6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

All personal change involves unlearning old ways of behaving and learning new ones, so it helps to have a way of looking at the learning process and how different people like to learn.

Kolb's learning cycle

David Kolb (1984) described a cyclical process of adult learning, often called the learning loop. Learning proceeds through a repeating cycle of having an experience, reflecting on it, drawing conclusions or theory from it, and then trying those ideas out — which generates the next experience.

Kolb named the four stages concrete experience (having the experience), reflective observation (reviewing and reflecting on what happened), abstract conceptualisation (drawing conclusions and forming a model from it) and active experimentation (planning and trying the next step). A learner can join the loop at any point — a hands-on workshop enters at concrete experience, a briefing pack enters at abstract conceptualisation — but the loop only closes when all four stages have been travelled.

This matters in change work because most change training stops halfway round the cycle. People are told about the new process and then sent back to the job: conceptualisation never becomes experimentation, nobody reflects on the first real attempts, and the confidence built in the classroom drains away within a fortnight of go-live.

The cycle's argument is that complete learning requires all four stages. Doing without reflecting produces repetition rather than improvement. Theorising without testing produces knowledge that never becomes ability.

Honey and Mumford's four learning styles

Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (1992) took this thinking a step further with the observation that different individuals possess different learning styles. These represent distinct preferences for one or more steps of the learning cycle, or tendencies to skip one or more steps, which will diminish learning opportunities.

The four styles map one-to-one onto the four stages of Kolb's cycle: the activist favours concrete experience, the reflector favours reflective observation, the theorist favours abstract conceptualisation, and the pragmatist favours active experimentation. That mapping is the fastest way to recover a style definition under exam pressure — remember which stage the style sits on and you can reconstruct both its strength and its blind spot.

Note that each style comes with a characteristic blind spot, not just a strength. That is the part candidates forget, and it is the part that matters in practice: the activist who never reflects and the reflector who never tries are both learning less than they could.

Preferences, not types

Three CM3 ideas are easy to confuse, and exam questions exploit the overlap. Personality preferences (Section 5.1) describe stable dispositions, such as where someone draws their energy from. Learning preferences — Kolb, Honey and Mumford — describe which stage of the learning cycle a person favours. Language style or VARK preferences (Section 12.1) describe the sensory channel through which someone best takes information in. The three sit on different axes, and one person can be a reflector who prefers visual material or an activist who prefers to read. A question describing someone who asks to watch a demonstration first is describing a reflector; one describing someone who wants a diagram rather than a written description is describing a language style preference.

Honey and Mumford's styles are also preferences rather than fixed types. Most people have a dominant style and a secondary one, the profile shifts with the subject matter and with the learner's confidence, and people under pressure fall back on their dominant style. Treating a style as a permanent label — she is an activist, so do not bother sending her the reading — misuses the model. CM3 treats the styles as a design aid for the change manager, not as a classification of the workforce.

Matching learning activities to styles

CM3 pairs each style with suitable activities:

Notice that on-job learning by trial and error appears for both activists and pragmatists, and that coaching appears for activists while support or coaching of practical value attracts pragmatists. The categories overlap; they are preferences, not partitions.

What this means for change training

The practical conclusion is that a single training format will underserve most of the workforce. A one-day classroom course suits theorists well, pragmatists moderately, and activists and reflectors poorly.

A change learning offer that covers the range typically includes:

• Background reading and rationale documents — for theorists, who want to understand the model and the reasoning before doing anything
• Hands-on practice environments and trial-and-error time — for activists, who need to have a go
• Recorded demonstrations and observation opportunities — for reflectors, who want to watch before risking
• Worked application to their own real cases — for pragmatists, who disengage from anything without immediate practical use

The cost of providing all four is usually lower than assumed, because much of it is a matter of format rather than additional content — the same material as a document, a recording, a practice environment and a worked example.

Sequencing matters as much as coverage. The learning dip described in Section 6.4 — the temporary fall in performance while an old competence is replaced by a new one — is deepest when learners are pushed into live use before they have had the stage of the cycle they most rely on. A reflector moved straight onto a live system with no demonstration, or a theorist asked to experiment before being given the rationale, dips further and recovers more slowly than they need to. Offering all four formats early, and letting people choose their own entry point into the cycle, flattens the dip rather than removing it.

The exam angle

Questions typically describe a behaviour and ask which style it demonstrates. The reliable markers:

• Wants background information, reasons and detail before starting → Theorist
• Wants to get straight in and try it → Activist
• Wants to watch someone else do it first → Reflector
• Wants to know how it applies to a current real problem → Pragmatist

Where candidates lose marks is on the second half of the model. A stem may describe the downside of a style rather than its preference — someone who keeps starting new pilots without ever reviewing the last one, for example. That is the activist's blind spot, not the pragmatist's impatience, and the distractors will offer both. Read whether the stem describes how the person prefers to learn or how they fail to learn, then answer from the matching column.