I Teach Serious Things. I Just Do It in a Funny Way!

When did serious become a synonym for forgettable?

I was giving a talk on how I teach innovation with comic books, when a professor leaned back and said, "Unlike you, I teach serious things — and this doesn't apply to me."

I smiled and said, "Unlike you, I teach serious things too. I just do it in a funny way."

It got a laugh. But underneath the joke is the question I care about most, and one every teacher, trainer, and leader should sit with: if your audience can't remember what you taught them, how serious was the teaching, really?

We've built a whole culture on the belief that rigor must be dry — that if something is engaging it must be shallow, that a dense journal article is "real" while a story with pictures is a toy. I think we have it backwards.

A decade of research and teaching taught me something uncomfortable. Most of the best business knowledge is locked inside academic journals almost no one reads — not undergraduates, not MBAs, not the executives who need it most. Even case studies, our gold standard, are long, text-heavy, and quickly forgotten. We were being rigorous and getting ignored. Rigor without retention isn't rigor. It's decoration.

So my co-authors and I did something that made a few colleagues nervous. We took ten years of research on how organizations grow — our Nail It, Scale It, Sail It framework — and turned it into an AI-enhanced graphic business novel: a real story, with characters and stakes, illustrated with generative AI, carrying the same ideas we used to deliver in slides and citations.

Then we tested it in real classrooms. Engagement went up. So did retention. The "funny way" turned out to be the serious way.

This “gimmick” rests on decades of cognitive science:

• The Picture Superiority Effect — we remember images far better than words alone.

• Dual-coding theory — pairing words with visuals builds two memory paths instead of one.

• Cognitive load theory — a clear story carries complex ideas with far less mental strain than dense text.

• Narrative memory — we're wired to remember what happens to people, not lists of principles. (Yes, the irony of saying that in a bullet list is not lost on me.)

What changed recently is feasibility. Producing a beautifully illustrated novel used to take an art budget and a year. Generative AI collapsed that into a process almost any educator can run — which means this is no longer a one-off. It's a repeatable blueprint for turning serious research into material people actually finish.

If you teach, train, or lead, here's what I'd take from it:

• "Serious" and "memorable" are not opposites. The goal isn't to dumb ideas down — it's to make them stick.

• Choose the format for the learner, not for your ego. A citation impresses your peers; a story changes someone's mind.

• Story + image beats text + bullet. Wrap your hardest idea in a character and a picture.

• AI lowers the barrier. You no longer need a studio to teach visually — just a good idea and the willingness to try.

So no — I don't think I teach less serious things than that professor does. I teach the same serious things. I just make sure people remember them.

And that, to me, is the most serious thing of all.