I’ve been lucky to spend this week at the beach—sunshine, long walks, and the kind of calm that resets your brain. Meanwhile, my son is in London on a short study-abroad adventure, and I’m counting the days until I get the full download when he's back in a few days.

And a quick correction: last week I botched the link to Ross Stevenson's fantastic YouTube channel. If you’re not following him—or his newsletter—you’re missing some really smart work. Definitely worth your time. (Hopefully I do better this week!)

Thanks for reading!
​

Supported by iSpring

Launching a training project and feeling stuck? This free template lays out the key stages, roles, and deliverables so the work stays clear, manageable, and repeatable. No guesswork. Just a simple plan you can use right away.

→ Grab the Excel project template​

​
Your Brain Can't Read and Listen Simultaneously

Your brain can multitask. Just badly.

When you try to read and listen simultaneously, one always loses. And in training, it's usually the narration that gets tuned out.

You've seen the crime scene: a slide packed with text while someone reads it aloud like a bedtime story. Learners read ahead, finish first, then zone out for 30 seconds waiting for the voice to catch up. You just paid for dead air.

Here's why it fails: reading and listening both use verbal processing. They compete for the same cognitive channel. When forced to choose, learners read the slide and ignore your voice.

Every day, thousands of presentations and courses get built around this mistake, all working against how the brain processes information.

Dual coding fixes this

Your brain has two main processing channels: visual and verbal. When they work together on the same idea, understanding deepens. But they need to share the load, not duplicate it.

Text on screen, same text read aloud? That's interference, not reinforcement. It doubles the cognitive cost without adding meaning.

Here's the better pattern

Picture this: a five-step process diagram with three-word labels. Clean. Scannable. Then your narration does the real work: "Step three is the bottleneck. That's where errors happen. Here's how to prevent them."

Now learners aren't processing two copies of the same sentence. They're integrating image and explanation into a mental model that sticks.

DO

• Show structure visually: relationships, sequence, hierarchy, flow
• Keep on-screen text minimal—labels, keywords, anchors
• Use narration to explain what matters and why
• Test it: remove the visual OR the narration. If nothing breaks, you haven't created dual coding—you've just decorated

DON'T

• Read full sentences from the slide
• Duplicate verbal information across text and audio
• Mistake icons or stock images for instructional structure
• Build slides that teach without narration (unless they're job aids)
• Confuse visual polish with cognitive design

When you get this right, slides get cleaner, narration gets sharper, and learning sticks—because you're designing for how the brain actually works.

​

Also supported by Neovation

Calling all L&D pros: Explore an AI toolkit built just for you! We'll show you how to create videos with AI avatars, build custom infographics, prototype learning games, and ensure your learning materials are WCAG AA-compliant.

→ Register for Beyond ChatGPT​

​
Want to go deeper? Here are three great places to start.

​

Worth your attention
​

Dual Coding In Action

Two minutes that prove dual coding works by making you feel both the problem and the fix. BrightCarbon commits the crime first—text-heavy slide, word-for-word narration, that inevitable "blah blah blah" in your head as you zone out. Then they flip it: clean visuals with narration that explains, not echoes. You can feel the difference instantly.

​

​

Dual Coding One Pager

A clean, one-page visual explainer of Dual Coding Theory—showing how visual and verbal information work together in memory—illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli.

​Oliver Caviglioli's One Pager on Dual Coding​

Dual Coding: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing?

While combining words and visuals (dual coding) helps learning, "too much of a good thing" can occur if the amount of information exceeds the learner's cognitive capacity.

​Dig into the science of dual coding​

The bottom line: Dual coding isn’t about making learning look better. It’s about making it easier to think. Pair words with visuals that explain the same idea, at the same time. Simple diagrams and labeled sketches help ideas stick. Decorative images don’t. If a visual doesn’t reduce effort or clarify meaning, it’s noise. Good design uses words and pictures to do one job well: help people understand, remember, and move on.

Did this resonate? Or miss entirely? Either way, hit reply—I’d love to hear your take.

sponsored by The Weekend Club

The best side-hustle to get into in 2026 - franchise this app that kills loneliness with brunch🥞 The Weekend Club uses AI to match 6 people for a 2-hour brunch. 2,000+ paid attendees / month across Asia. Email business@the-wknd.club to learn more!

​→ See how it works​

🎵 Today I'm listening to Del Water Gap​

📍Where I'll be next

• ​Learning Network Book Club, Jan 26 (Online)
• ​LearnTec, May 5-7 (Karlsruhe, Germany)
• ​ATD International Conference, May 17-20 (Los Angeles, CA)

If today’s issue was useful, my book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro goes deeper on designing learning that earns attention and drives action. And if you’ve read it, a short review helps more than you might think.