#kolbs-learning-theory

#kolbs-learning-theory

Product knowledge training is about methodically educating employees, partners, and customers about the ins and outs of a company's products or services. For employees and partners, it's the essential working knowledge they need to confidently sell, support, and deliver the product. For customers, it's the know-how they need to adopt it smoothly and get the most value from it.

Real change rarely happens through debate or persuasion. Instead, transformation grows out of relationships, shared struggle, cognitive dissonance, and practice. Together, Kelly and Lewis explore what organizers can learn from the science of neuroplasticity, the role of rupture and confrontation, and why movements need to focus less on 'changing minds' and more on creating conditions where people can unlearn harmful beliefs and step into collective action.

In her book Hope in the Dark, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit observes that transformation starts in the margins. The book explores social movements throughout history, but the notion that mainstream beliefs grow from fringe ideas once thought to be outrageous is familiar to anyone who has watched change happen. Hope, she says, lives in the dark around the edges.

At its core, the curve of learning represents how quickly proficiency increases through experience. The learning curve theory shows that improvement is not linear. At first, people might feel confused and make mistakes, which can slow progress. After some time, though, they start to improve faster. Eventually, as they approach mastery, progress may slow again.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that human knowledge, at its most foundational and meaningful, is ineffable. Moreover, it requires stepping beyond what one sees as the established rules and into the realm of the unknown. Think of a master jazz musician or an elite athlete who, after facing an unpredictable moment, would find it impossible to convey precisely how and why they did what they did to deliver a peak performance.

In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.

Like most Americans, my view of homeschooling was framed through the lens of abnormality. My own public-school education was my only frame of reference. Although my own experience wasn't great, it was familiar. It was the system I knew. As a college professor, I regularly saw the academic gaps my students carried with them from their public-school education. Yet even then, I struggled to imagine an alternative. My instinct was always to fix the existing system, not step outside of it.

Collective learning is how a group or system creates, improves, and keeps knowledge. This knowledge lasts beyond any one person or cohort. That is the most practical collective learning definition, because it shifts the focus away from individuals and toward the learning system itself.

"We don't have a platform for this." "We don't have an LMS." "We just need something simple." "We don't really have the budget for eLearning." And suddenly, every Instructional Designer and Learning Experience Designer in the room feels a tiny wave of professional panic. Because let's be honest: most of us were trained, socialized, and rewarded in environments where "good learning" was synonymous with technology. Authoring tools. Learning platforms. Interactive modules. Video. Simulations. Analytics dashboards. AI-powered everything.

The most exciting moments for a teacher come when students stumble onto something unexpected-when they run to my office to tell me about a new twist in their thinking about birds in Sula or the discovery of yet another biblical reflection in Housekeeping. Those revelations come only when they survey the text as it is, not as they assume it to be.

For years, Learning and Development teams have been told they have a technology problem. If only they implemented the right LMS. If only they added an LXP. If only they layered analytics on top. If only they automated a few more workflows. Yet despite an ever-growing learning tech stack, most L&D teams feel more overwhelmed than ever. Training requests pile up. Programs take months to launch.

Learning today doesn't usually look broken. It looks like a well-run treadmill, always on, always moving, quietly exhausting everyone. New initiatives, new tools, new priorities. New "must-have" skills. Even when learning is thoughtfully designed, there's a nagging sense that nothing sticks because nothing gets a chance to. People finish the course, grab the badge, and move on to the next thing before the last thing has had time to show up in how they work.