Following on from the David Kolb interview, Dr Peter Honey tells TrainingZone.co.uk how the Honey & Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire came into being.

The Honey & Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) was first published in 1982 – so long ago that many trainers (well, young trainers!) can’t remember life with out it. Once people recover from the discovery that Honey & Mumford are both still alive and well (!), they are often curious to know the circumstances that led to the creation of the LSQ.

To begin at the beginning

I first met Alan Mumford in the mid-seventies when we co-operated on a number management training projects in ICL (International Computers Limited). Soon after, Alan moved to take up a position as the management development advisor in Chloride. He inherited an office with lots of filing cabinets in a row along one wall, each with metal bar and large padlock. These cabinets contained psychological reports for all the managers in Chloride with results from a series of diagnostics covering IQ, personality, analytical thinking, leadership skills – and all the rest of it.

Alan wondered how he could use the information contained in these confidential reports to help him produce personal development plans tailor-made for each manager. I was called in and I soon realised that, whilst the psychological reports were very comprehensive, a vital piece of information was missing; how each manager preferred to learn. In fact, learning was never mentioned in any of the reports.

The quest was on to plug the gap by finding a way to get reliable information about each manager’s learning style preferences. I read everything I could find on the subject (not much in those days!) and, of course, came across David Kolb’s work on experiential learning. Alan took the opportunity to meet David in the States and we secured his permission to try out his learning style inventory on a sample of the managers in Chloride. However, we quickly came up against a problem; our target population didn’t warm to Kolb’s learning cycle (the labels failed to engage them) and they found the inventory difficult because they had never thought about how they learned. They claimed to ‘just do it’ without knowing how.

This led to four years experimentation with different versions of a behavioural checklist, exploring ‘everyday’ likes and dislikes in the context of work. We deliberately avoided asking direct questions about how managers’ learnt. We also decided to align ‘our’ four learning styles – activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist – with the stages in the cycle so that managers could quickly see how the preferences linked to the stages in the learning cycle.

Getting published

There is an amusing story about how the questionnaire came to be self-published. Our original intention was to send the manuscript (there were such things as manuscripts in those days!) to a ‘proper’ publisher, but I, in a flush of entrepreneurial zeal, managed to persuade Alan that we should go it alone. We each contributed 50/50 towards the printing and marketing costs.

It was decided that since this was a specialist publication, aimed a niche market of management trainers, we would bring 500 copies into the world. To our surprise, they had sold out in four weeks! We met to decide whether to print any more copies and, if so, how many. Alan was characteristically cautious; he argued that, whilst the take-up had been astonishing, the market would be close to saturation by now and that only a few more copies should be printed. I, always one to take a risk, urged Alan to be bold and print another 500 copies. They sold out in about 6 weeks!

An interesting aspect of my collaboration with Alan – our work on learning styles was the first of many co-authored publications - is that Alan and I have quite different learning style preferences. Left to my own devices, I tend to be pragmatist/activist whereas Alan has reflector/theorist leanings. This means that we have always worked to together in a way where the skills of one make up for the deficiencies of the other. I use my swashbuckling tendencies to urge Alan to take risks, and painstaking Alan encourages me to take more care, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. The resulting partnership works well; the attraction of opposites and an illustration of how the whole equals more than the sum of the parts.

After all these years extolling the worthwhileness of people understanding their preferences, you might be forgiven for thinking that learning styles are the whole story. Not so. I have always made it clear that I consider learning styles to be just one piece in the learning jigsaw. Equally important is the working environment and the extent to which it is learning-friendly, peoples’ willingness to make and take learning opportunities and the skills people need to develop to become effective learners.

In my opinion there is nothing more important than helping people to become more effective learners. Your behaviour as a trainer and the methods you employ, are heavily ‘contaminated’ by your own preferences – which is why I have developed a self-assessment questionnaire – Trainer Styles - specifically for trainers. Here is a question to ponder; how do you choose from the plethora of training methods available? If you are honest, you will realise that you tend to choose the methods you are familiar with and enjoy yourself regardless of their fit with the learners you are seeking to help. In other words, the chances are that your own preferences predominate. This is just one reason why it is worth expanding your repertoire as a trainer – and taking stock of your trainer style(s) is a good starting point.

Dr Peter Honey is Founder of Peter Honey Publications Ltd. He blogs for People Management and his website is www.peterhoney.com.