Kolb's learning styles and the way we set up business meetings
There are a lot of ways of learning (gather information) and mostly these ways are environmentally influenced. I’m talking about learning visually, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile learning. Studies show that 65% of our world population learns visually. This is huge and probably the main reason why our business meetings don’t work.
According to Kolb there is another way of learning which includes perception and processing. Based on his experiments there are 4 phases each student has to go through in order to fully comprehend new matter.
Concrete Experience - the learner encounters a concrete experience. This might be a new experience or situation, or a reinterpretation of existing experience in the light of new concepts. (Accommodating - Diverging)
Reflective Observation of the New Experience - the learner reflects on the new experience in the light of their existing knowledge. Of particular importance are any inconsistencies between experience and understanding. (Diverging, Assimilating)
Abstract Conceptualization - reflection gives rise to a new idea, or a modification of an existing abstract concept (the person has learned from their experience). (Assimilating - Converging)
Active Experimentation - the newly created or modified concepts give rise to experimentation. The learner applies their idea(s) to the world around them to see what happens. (Converging - Accommodating)
When learning something new, each person feels more inclined to be either accommodating, diverging, assimilating or converging.
People who are more divergent (feeling and watching) in their way of learning prefer watching over doing. These people perform better in brainstorm sessions and in group. We can also call them dreamers and they would like to have answers to “why” questions.
Accommodators prefer to be active participants in their learning experience (doing and feeling). Their decisions are mostly based on their gut feeling rather than logic reasoning. We could call these people doers and they would like to have answers to '“what if” and “why not” questions.
Assimilators achieve best when watching and thinking. They prefer lecture methods followed by a demonstration. These people like structured ways of working and are good at abstract thinking. These are our thinking people and would like to have answers to “what is there to know” questions.
Lastly we have our Convergers (doing and thinking). They are really great at solving problems but more to a technical kind of problem. They’re deciders and will apply what’s being taught into experiments from which you can conclude something.
In order to make thoughtful decisions and come up with good solutions for a specific problem, it is important we understand the problem and that we are aligned on this. If our way of perception and processing happens in 4 different ways, you can see that it is important that we make sure that, whenever we are in a meeting, we address these 4 types of phases of understanding a problem.
So when knowing the above and looking at our way of how we approach meetings we see that something is off. Why is there only one (main) way of how we approach meetings? Shouldn’t we look into different ways to come to solutions/decisions so that we can get the full potential out of every participant?
Not only does this mean that we can get more out of our participants, but it also means we can get more out of our business meetings and thus are productive, come with more and better solutions and we are able to make decisions better.
Improving our business means deep understanding of the problems in order to find solutions. We all learn, perceive and process things differently so we should change the way we work and make meetings better accessible.
Have a great week!
Further information and sources:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html
https://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/learning/kolb.htm
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/how-to-work-4-different-learning-types