6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

David Kolb's learning loop cycles through concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation

Honey and Mumford identified four learning styles reflecting preferences for stages of that cycle: activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist

Theorists learn logically from first principles and models, often from reading, research or presentations

Activists learn best from experiences where they can have a go, but may move on too quickly without reflecting

Each style also has a characteristic way of missing learning opportunities, which change managers should design around

Last updated: September 2026

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.

Preference for this stage Style Likely to...

Activity Activist Learn best from experiences where they can have a go ; move on too quickly from experience to experience without allowing time for reflection

Reflection Reflector Learn best from watching others and reflecting on their own experiences; miss learning opportunities by not taking the risk of trying things practically

Theorising Theorist Learn logically from first principles and models, often from reading, research or presentations ; have an aversion to intuitions or creative approaches and miss learning opportunities as a result

Trying ideas out Pragmatist Learn by testing and applying ideas and models they see as relevant to a current problem; be open to support or coaching they think will be of practical value; miss out on learning opportunities for which they cannot see an immediate practical use

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:

Style Learning activities

Activists On-job learning by trial and error; coaching from a respected practitioner; activity-based learning in groups

• Reflectors Observing others live or on video; action learning sets; making notes and keeping a learning diary
• Theorists Courses and seminars; lectures and presentations; reading and personal research

Pragmatists Practical workshops; on-job learning by trial and error; applying tools and models to practice situations

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.