Some of your goals will require learning new skills, learning new knowledge, and new expertise altogether. You may also need to rewire new habits, which you will need to learn, practice and maintain.
For you to successfully go through the learning required and achieve your goal, you will find that discovering your learning style will be of much help.
Continuous learning is, quite simply, the key to sustained innovation and competitiveness ~ Peter Honey
Your learning style
In the ICM programme, we will use Kolb’s cyclical stages of learning and the Honey & Mumford assessment tool to identify your learning styles and preferences.
Kolb’s learning cycle proposes that we all learn from our experience in a cyclical way.
People observe something happening and reflect on their observations. This experience and reflection is then incorporated into the theoretical knowledge that the person already possesses, or is supported by reading and training, building up a framework into which to fit their experience. To complete the cycle, people then need to be able to practice the new skills they have learned.
Peter Honey and Alan Mumford built on Kolb’s work to propose the theory of learning styles:
- Activist
- Pragmatist
- Reflector
- Theorist
Activists learn by doing.
Concrete Experience & Activists – ‘here and now’, gregarious, seek challenge and immediate experience, open-minded, bored with implementation.
Activists do not want to hear what they should be doing, they want to dive in head-first and have a go.
Activists are likely to say:
“Let’s just give it a go and see what happens”
“Can I try it out?”
Reflectors like to think about what they are learning.
Reflective Observation & Reflectors – ‘stand back’, gather data, ponder and analyse, delay reaching conclusions, listen before speaking, thoughtful.
Reflectors want to understand things thoroughly before they try them out.
Reflectors are likely to say:
“Let me just think about this for a moment”
“Don’t let’s rush into anything”
Theorists like to understand how the new learning fits into their ‘framework’ and into previous theories.
Abstract Conception & Theorists – think things through in logical steps, assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories, rationally objective, reject subjectivity and flippancy.
Theorists are likely to be uncomfortable with things that do not fit with what they already know.
Theorists are likely to say:
“But how does this fit in with [x]?”
“I would just like to understand the principles behind this a bit more”
Pragmatists care about what works in the real world.
Active Experiment & Pragmatists – seek and try out new ideas, practical, down-to-earth, enjoy problem solving and decision-making quickly, bored with long discussions.
Pragmatists are not interested in abstract concepts, they just want to know if it works.
Pragmatists are likely to say:
“How will it work in practice?”
“I just don’t see how this is relevant”
Other learning styles
Peter Hill talks about “practical learning styles” which identifies learning preferences according to four dimensions:
- Realistic – Creative
- Doer – Thinker
- Verbaliser – Visualiser
- Surface processor – Deep processor
Another model called the VAK model looks at our preferences for the mode of learning:
- Visual – visual learners prefer to take in information by seeing and often process it in pictorial form. This means that they will often think or remember things in pictures and like to read, see graphs, and use symbols.
- Auditory – Auditory learners prefer to listen and take information in by what they hear. They favour lectures and discussions over reading.
- Kinesthetic – Kinaesthetic learners learn by experience and particularly by tactile exploration of the world. Most young children are natural kinaesthetics, always wanting to feel something or put it in their mouths!
Why is understanding your learning style important?
This can be summed up by a simple formula:
P = L + B
where P is for Performance, L is for Learning and B is for Behaviour
In other words, everyone’s performance flows from their past and current learning and from what they say and do – their behaviour.
✨ Here are a few values about learning that you will find useful in achieving your goals:
- Learning, as a process, supersedes all others.
- Since it is just as easy to learn wrong things as it is to learn right things, what constitutes good learning needs to be debated and agreed.
- You are what you learn; all you know, all your skills and all your beliefs have been learned.
- Learning is a skill which, like any other skill, you can develop and improve. Learning to learn is your ultimate life skill.
- Everything that happens to you, at work or elsewhere, provides you with an opportunity to learn.
- Learning is only effective when you convert it into improved performance.
- You need to supplement your tacit ‘intuitive’ learning with explicit ‘conscious’ learning that is clear and communicable.
- At work, learning and achieving are twin priorities.
- Reviewing is the gateway to appropriate learning and action.
- It is your duty to share your learning and spread your best practices.
Impact Coaching & Mentoring (ICM) for Leaders 