Many teams have received training that made complete sense at the time, but was entirely forgotten in the moment it was designed for. The session was well delivered, the logic was sound and the material was thorough. It just didn’t stick, leaving people relying on instinct to muddle through what should have been a prepared operation.
Being told how to do something, no matter how clearly and completely, does not equate to learning how to do it, particularly under pressure. Experiential learning is the way we advocate closing the gap.
What is experiential learning?
Experiential learning is, at its simplest, learning by doing. It is then reinforced by reflection, which allows participants to make sense of what was done. The theoretical underpinning that most experts use is Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, which sets out four stages: a concrete experience, reflective observation of that experience, abstract conceptualisation that turns the reflection into a principle, and active experimentation that tests the principle in the next turn of the wheel. The complete cycle is the key to effective experiential learning, with every stage taking place in turn to make the difference. Skip the reflection and you are left with an activity; skip the experience and you are back to the slides, without meaningful engagement.
The scenario supplies the experience
A well-designed scenario supplies the first stage of that loop. When a team runs a bespoke exercise built around its own work, it generates a genuine concrete experience: real choices, real consequences, and the friction of people having to reach agreement under pressure with the clock running. That is the raw material of learning, and it is something a presentation can describe but never manufacture.
The debrief is where the learning happens
Raw experience, though, is not yet learning, and this is where a great deal of so-called experiential training ends up being just entertaining. An afternoon of shared experiences building spaghetti towers, go-karting, or axe-throwing is fun, and may bring a team closer together (or reinforce fault lines) but without a reflective stage attached, nothing useful is likely to make it back into the office on the next day. We deliver Kolb’s reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation deliberately, through After Action Review, with our scenarios and exercises designed to flush out genuinely useful insight and observations. We talk through decisions, their timing, on what information, where information flowed and didn’t, and which assumptions proved wrong and which ones were useful. This is not a new method; it is how the army has trained for decades. The After Action Review, held whether the exercise succeeded or failed, is a structured debrief, run because an organisation that stakes lives on performance cannot afford training that does not transfer. The event is not the learning; the debrief is, which is why it is designed as a stage of the exercise rather than added on at the end.
One loop teaches; repetition builds the habit
A single well-run session delivers a lesson. What it cannot deliver on its own is a habit, and the habit is the real prize. A framework can be explained on a slide in five minutes; a habit is built only by repetition under realistic load. It is why the army rehearses its drills under incremental pressure until they run without conscious thought, so that when the pressure is real the trained response is already there. The first scenario is hard work, because the team has to keep reminding itself what it is actually trying to achieve. By the third or fourth, the reminders thin out and the strategic lens has become the remembered guide and handrail rather than something to look up. This is the same mechanism by which repeated decision-making scenarios build a strategic-thinking habit rather than merely teach a framework. A single loop is a useful experience; several loops change how a team thinks and delegates. That is the benefit of experiential learning worth paying for: a way of working that holds under pressure, not a lesson that ticks a box but is forgotten next week.
The experience works best when it’s relevant
None of this works that well as a generic puzzle. Ideally, the experience has to reflect the team’s real work, and the way that work is genuinely done rather than the way it is imagined. Realistic frictions give the reflection stage something relevant to bite on. There is always a gap between the plan as written and the plan as practised, and a scenario-based exercise is the cheapest place to find that gap, in a setting where mistakes have value, not cost. This is what immersive learning and interactive training are for: a realistic experience that gives the debrief something honest to work with, rather than immersion as spectacle. It is also why effective strategic training is a matter of method rather than content. The examples that do this best rarely look like training at all. Experiential learning activities can be as understated as a 90-minute tabletop exercise or as involved as a multi-day simulation with role-played stakeholders and injected news, and an action learning set does the same with a real problem the team is already carrying. The format is chosen by the stretch required, not by what the discipline is called.
An experience beats an explanation
Go back to the training that had evaporated by the time it was needed. Run that same material as a scenario rather than a briefing. Let the team make the wrong call, feel the consequence, and take it apart together in a proper debrief, then run it again with what they learned. When the moment finally comes, they will not be straining to recall what a slide said, because they will have lived a version of it. That is the whole case for experiential learning in a single line: an experience beats an explanation, because a team that has done something does not need to remember it.
At Evocatus, every training programme is built around the work your team actually does, and designed so that the debrief, not the activity, carries the value. If you would rather your people kept the lesson than the handout, that is where we begin.