David Kolb’s Contribution

This might explain the irony of why the subject of experiential learning, however deafening its logic, is not widely accepted within traditional academic business disciplines. In fact its efficacy has been recognized for almost a century (see Chapter 4 of this volume), with the most modern proponents being David Kolb, professor of organizational behavior at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and his associate Roger Fry who have taken the concept to its most developed stage by integrating multiple epistemologies into a formal theory of learning (Kolb, 1984).

The model incorporates identifying an experience or problem situation, a reflective phase within which the learner examines the experience and draws erudition from that reflection and a testing phase, within which the new insights or learning is integrated with the learner’s own conceptual framework and applied to a new problem situation or experience. Where their model falls short in the modern workplace is in the reflection phase, which is dependent on accurate memory recall. As Kantrow has pointed out, this is frequently missing while the flexible labor market has served to compound the deficit (Kantrow, 1984). As such, OM also has to be captured before it becomes mindless. To accommodate the business world and the current working environment, my continuous learning spiral incorporates three extra stages: an up-front planning component to schedule a budgeted action strategy, one that requires a capture element, and another that translates any erudition into a lessons audit.

Like business history, it is in the United States that experiential learning’s designation as a curricula subject is most prevalent, but it is still hesitant, with its use imprecisely self-described as providing the “application of theory to a real-world business problem,” a depiction that I would guess still applies to only current practice (Business School Admission, 2003).^[2] Less than a third of the 25 top-ranked MBA business schools offer the stated subject as a teaching method. Within this, averages of just 15% of students partake in their courses. In contrast, as Stephen Brookfield has noted, conventional education’s more one-dimensional emphasis is still on nontacit data and information, or so-called explicit knowledge. The lessons of history are still mostly uncollected in any diligent way, untaught as a technique of improving decision making, unused, and for the most part, lost.

^[2] The Business School Admission Web site is devoted to information needed to help students gain admission into top MBA programs.