ABSTRACT
David Kolb's specific approach occupies a unique place in the study of management learning because it integrates multiple epistemologies into a formal theory of learning, notably John Dewey's pragmatism, Kurt Lewin's social psychology, Jean Piaget's cognitive development, Carl Rogers' client-centred therapy, Abraham Maslow's humanism, and Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy. Kolb's four-stage Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) is that learning from experience is two-dimensional – individuals first grasp experience and then transform it. In addition to using prior experience as a tool to assess the many variants of decision-making before and after actual events, the logic of the experience-based management learning spiral is to make continual incremental improvements to real business situations. Indeed, Kolb's own efforts have been in train for around a quarter of a century, and he has wearily stated that his experiential learning theory only started to be recognized empirically after more than ten years.
