Dominant models of organisational learning treat knowledge as transferable content. Information flows in one direction – from expert to novice, from presentation to participant – with the implicit assumption that understanding follows comprehension. The body, in this framework, is incidental. A vessel that carries the mind to the training room.
This separation is not theoretically sound, nor is it aligned with what we know about how learning actually occurs. Over the past seven decades, a consistent stream of scholarship has instituted something more precise: learning is fundamentally an embodied phenomenon.
Knowledge is not something absorbed through cognition alone. It is constructed through sustained physical, emotional, and social engagement with experience. When we decoupled the mind from the body in our theories of development, we created a fiction that has proven remarkably durable, remarkably ineffective and unsurprisingly frustrating to organisational leaders everywhere.
The Theoretical Case
David Kolb’s experiential learning theory, emerging from John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, Kurt Lewin’s action research, and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, offered a more rigorous account than the information-transfer model.
Kolb suggested knowledge is created through the transformation of experience, not through passive information reception. He put forward a four-stage cycle that would address this fundamental learning process: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation.
But Kolb’s framework contained something critical that organisational development has consistently underemphasised:
Concrete experience cannot be abstracted away. It is not incidental theatre. It is the material through which all subsequent learning must pass.
Contemporary embodied cognition research has deepened this understanding. Lawrence Shapiro’s work demonstrates that thinking and learning are distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. They do not simply reside ‘above the neck’. Physical engagement is not supplementary to learning – it is constitutive of it.
When learners are physically immersed in contextually rich environments, sensory-motor information becomes embedded in memory traces in ways that enable deeper conceptual understanding than intellectual engagement alone.
T.H. Morris’s systematic review of Kolb’s model makes the implications explicit: the most effective experiential learning occurs when learners are simultaneously and fully engaged – physically, socially, and cognitively – in environments rich enough to afford genuine experimentation and discovery. The body cannot be decoupled from the mind during this process. To treat it as separable is to misunderstand how real learning occurs.
Why Organisations Resist This
There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary development practice. The theory is clear. The evidence is mounting. Yet organisations continue to default to models predicated on disembodied knowledge transfer.
Several factors sustain this disconnect.
- Efficiency: it is faster and cheaper to deliver content than to create the conditions for embodied learning. And it’s an easy sell – the packaging is clear and the product predictable. You can also sell a lot of them. For example, webinar scales. However, a practice-based learning environment does not.
- Control: content-delivery models assume a linear transmission where the expert knows what should be learned and designs the content accordingly. Embodied learning is more uncertain. Emergence occurs. The learning that surfaces may not align with what was planned.
- Deeper cultural inheritance: the Western philosophical tradition has long privileged mind over body, reason over sensation, the individual over the relational context. Organisations are not exempt from this inheritance.
Our conclusion should come as no surprise to you – this resistance comes at a cost.
When learning is reduced solely to information transfer, several things are forfeited.
- Knowledge remains abstract – held at a distance from the learner’s actual practice and relationships. You’ll hear participants say, “That was a really engaging session, but by the time Monday came along, it didn’t feel very practical.”
- Behavioural change becomes episodic rather than integrated; new patterns are overlaid on existing ones without displacing them – “We really tried to implement the ideas we were taught, but it just became too hard once the pressure was on.”.
- And critically, the collaborative and relational dimensions of learning – the dimensions most essential to organisational change – are systematically underutilised. You’ll hear it mostly in comments like, “I thought we understood what the framework was, but when it came to trying it, we couldn’t really work out here to start. So we left it and moved on.”
What Embodied Learning Requires
Engaging the body in learning is not a matter of adding movement or physical activities to otherwise cognitive content. It requires a fundamental rethinking of what learning environments are for.
An embodied learning approach privileges direct engagement with authentic, real-world problems or challenges.
It values the sensory, emotional, and relational data that emerges when people work together on something that matters. It treats the patterns of interaction – how people listen, challenge, defer, connect – as legitimate learning content, not as process noise to be managed around.
Crucially, embodied learning is irreducibly social.
Piaget understood learning as construction occurring through interaction with the environment. Contemporary group analytic and complexity-informed approaches have extended this: meaning-making is participatory and collaborative. It is mediated through the body and embedded within social, spatial, and temporal realities.
You cannot learn to work with others better in isolation. The learning emerges from the actual practice of working with them, with attention to what is happening in real time.
This explains why certain forms of learning prove more durable than others. When you have felt something land – when your body has registered a shift in how you move, speak, or relate; when your colleagues have witnessed it; when you have collectively reflected on what has changed – the learning becomes integrated. It is not vulnerable to the forgetting that typically follows classroom-based content. It lives in your practice.
The Organisational Implication
The case for embodied learning is not misinformed idealism. It is practical and economic. Organisations invest in development because they want sustained behavioural change and improved collective capability. If the theory of how learning integrates is correct, then the implications are substantial.
- Development programs focused primarily on content delivery – regardless of quality or relevance – are likely to produce limited and temporary effects. Knowledge may be acquired, but it remains decoupled from practice and from the relationships that enable practice.
- The most promising approaches are those that engage people in working together on authentic challenges, with structured attention to what is happening in the room and in the relationships being formed and tested. This is slower. It is more demanding. But it addresses the actual site where change must occur: in the patterns of interaction, sense-making, and relational capacity that constitute organisational life.
- The unit of change should be the group, not the individual. When a team learns together – when they practice something together, notice what emerges, reflect on their own patterns, and adjust – they are developing collective capacity. The learning becomes embedded not in isolated individuals but in how they work together. This is far more durable than individual competency acquisition.
The Argument for Embodied Learning
The theory is coherent and the evidence clear. What remains is a matter of executive or institutional will – a preparedness to accept the time, discomfort, and uncertainty that genuine learning requires.
Embodied learning offers something that content-delivery models cannot: the integration of cognition, emotion, psychology, and relational dynamics into a unified process.
Embodied learning should not be understood as a ‘luxury’ for organisations seeking sustainable change. It is the actual mechanism through which people and organisations become capable of responding creatively and sustainably to complexity. It creates the conditions under which people develop genuine adaptive capacity.
Content-delivery models may achieve compliance, but they do not generate lasting change.
References
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan.
Kolb, D. A. (2014). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Pearson Education.
Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34–46.
Morris, T. H. (2020). Experiential learning—A systematic review and revision of Kolb’s model. Interactive Learning Environments, 28(8), 1744–5191.
Pavlis, D., & Gkiosos, J. (2017). John Dewey, from philosophy of pragmatism to progressive education. Journal of Arts and Humanities, 6(9), 23–30.
Piaget, J. (1976). Piaget’s theory. In Piaget and his school: A reader in developmental psychology (pp. 11–23). Springer.
Shapiro, L., & Spaulding, S. (2025). Embodied cognition. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2025 ed.).