Adapting Kolb to Modern Conditions

As for myself, I have deliberately not tinkered with the mechanics of experiential learning—rather, just the aspects that can adapt it more effectively to business practice and the modern working environment (Kransdorff, 1998, 2006).

For example, because traditional experiential learning concentrates on the application of contemporary experience, my approach has been to introduce prior experience to the table, a feature that should open up vast new areas of scholarship for academia and would-be benefits for practicing organizations. As traditional experiential learning within organizations also concentrates on the correction of mistakes, I have extended the discipline to address all decision making through a preselection process that filters in perceived prime learning prospects. And since the flexible labor market has made organizational memory (OM) employee resident, my focus has been to return this valuable intellectual asset to the employer through the application of two refined mediums (oral debriefing for short- and medium-term OM and corporate history for long-term OM) that allow transient individuals to have something more valuable with which to work in their decision-making processes with new employers. Experience-based management (EBM) then uses a portable “lessons learned” (Kransdorff, 2006) approach that is easily moved down the high-churn generations. I trust that I have given OM and experiential learning the lease of life it deserves as well as corporate and business history, the root of OM, an enhanced role beyond superficial public relations, marketing, and indulgent tribute.

Experiential learning is truly an augmentation thing. U.S. author Russell Hoban says it well in his 1973 book The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz: “If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time” (Cape, 1973).