Everything started with one visual.

A tennis court made of kitchen sponges is a strange thing to look at.

There is nothing unfamiliar in the picture. We know what a tennis court looks like, and we know what a sponge is. We know what they are made for. Yet putting the two together makes us stop for a second. The curious part is not either object, but what happens between them.

Now, if I add Clean Game next to it, some associations would probably easily appear in your mind.

This is roughly how a creative concept works.

We usually encounter creative concepts after most of the thinking has been done. Someone has a message to communicate, a product to sell or an idea to explain, and the concept gives it a form. This is how concepts are commonly used in advertising, branding, and editorial work. They make ideas noticeable and memorable.

There's another way to use them that interests me more.

Instead of starting with an idea and asking how to express it creatively, we can start with the concept and see what ideas it produces.

Suppose we replace the tennis court with honey but keep the sponge.

At first the combination seems less promising. A sponge absorbs things. Honey is sticky. We could turn either property into a metaphor, but that would mostly tell us things we already know.

It gets more interesting if we stop interpreting the objects and imagine what would actually happen.

Pour honey into a sponge.

It would be absorbed, but not like water. It would move slowly. Some would remain near the surface, some would penetrate further. Getting it back out would be difficult. Even after squeezing the sponge, some honey would remain inside. Eventually the sponge would become saturated.

None of these observations is particularly profound. But they give us somewhere to go.

Take the difficulty of getting the honey back out. There is something familiar about it. A writer reads a book, has a conversation, notices something, remembers an experience. If an idea genuinely enters their thinking, it becomes surprisingly difficult to extract it in its original state. It gets mixed with everything already there.

Perhaps this is one difference between repeating an idea and having an idea become yours.

That wasn't a point I needed the sponge to illustrate. I got to the point because I followed what happened to the sponge.

The useful unit, then, may not be the metaphor. It may be the relationship.

Ask what a sponge symbolizes, and you get one family of ideas. Ask what honey symbolizes, and you get another. Ask what changes when honey enters a sponge and you begin to find properties belonging to neither object on its own.

Slowness. Saturation. Retention. Difficult extraction. A change in texture. A substance becoming part of a structure.

Each gives us somewhere else to go.

So perhaps the useful sequence is:

The temptation is to jump directly from things to meaning.
The middle is where most of the interesting thinking happens.

If relationships are where the most interesting part happens, can we create them deliberately?

Probably. Though starting with a search for something “creative” doesn't help much.

Growth gives us plants. Direction gives us compasses. Transformation gives us butterflies. Collaboration gives us puzzle pieces. There is nothing inherently wrong with these metaphors. They have simply been connected so many times that there is little left for us to discover.

A more productive starting point is distance.

Take the thing you're working on and bring something into it from a territory that doesn't naturally belong there.

A writer might borrow from architecture. A consultant from theater. A learning designer from restaurants. A strategist from biology. Or we can go further and use an ordinary physical object whose main advantage is that it seems irrelevant.

Like a sponge.

Once we have two things, the instinct is to ask what they have in common. That can pull us straight back into a familiar analogy: a company is like a ship because both need direction; a team is like an orchestra because people need to coordinate.

A stranger question is what one thing does to the other.

Combine them. Replace part of one with the other. Change the scale. Make one obey the rules of the other. Force them to share an environment.

• Change the material, and a tennis court becomes a sponge.
• Change the rules, and a business meeting might behave like a theater rehearsal.
• Change the context, and the museum logic might enter a consulting session.
• Change the function, and a book might become a decision-making device rather than something to read from beginning to end.

These operations are playful, but that's partly why they work. Play postpones the demand to be sensible. A strange combination gets a little time to exist before we decide whether it is useful.

Generate the relationship first. Interrogate it second.

• What changed?
• What became easier or harder?
• What appeared that wasn't there before?
• What accumulates?
• What disappears?
• What happens over time?
• What can no longer be reversed?

These questions produce observations before interpretations.

“Some honey remains trapped” gives us retention. Difficult extraction suggests transformation. A full sponge gives us saturation. Honey moving differently from water gives us viscosity and speed.

Now the objects begin to matter less. We have properties that can travel.

This suggests a useful distinction. A metaphor helps us understand one thing through another. A generative creative concept behaves more like a small system we can continue investigating.

If a combination gives you one clever interpretation, you may have a metaphor.

If it keeps producing questions, properties, and applications, you may have found a concept.

Let's see how far it travels.

We'll keep the sponge and honey exactly as they are. Only the territory changes.

If sponge + honey can lead to writing, marketing, AI, leadership and strategy, it can probably lead almost anywhere. And a tool capable of generating anything can easily generate a great deal that isn't worth saying.

Generation is only half the job. The other half is selection.

Imagine two people running the same experiment. One notices saturation and starts thinking about information overload. Another notices viscosity and becomes interested in slow learning. Someone else sees attraction and retention and thinks immediately about marketing.

The concept is the same. What they notice isn't. This is where content starts becoming personal.

We tend to define a content territory by subjects: leadership, AI, innovation; creativity, learning, product design. Subjects tell us what someone talks about. They tell us much less about how that person thinks.

Thousands of people can write about creativity. What makes one person's work recognizable is often the pattern underneath: the questions they repeatedly ask, the relationships they notice and the explanations they find convincing.

This also changes how I think about values.

When we want people to understand ours, we tend to state them: curiosity, freedom, care, playfulness, rigour. Almost anyone can claim those words. It is harder to repeatedly behave according to them.

If curiosity matters, it should affect what you investigate. If interdisciplinarity matters, it should change where you look for answers. If playfulness matters, it should be visible in how you manipulate ideas, not merely appear as a topic called “playfulness.”

Values become more credible when they operate as constraints on the work.

Someone might work across product design, learning and personal branding.
The subjects have little obvious coherence. But if they repeatedly explore all three through cultural references, playful experiments or connections between disciplines, an audience gradually learns the deeper pattern.

The coherence doesn't always come from the subjects. It comes from the mind moving through them.

A painting can become a probe (my example). So can a fairy tale, a scientific principle, an object found in a kitchen, a film scene or a strange combination like "sponge + honey".

Put it into a territory and see what it reveals. Some combinations produce nothing. Some give us a clever analogy that isn't worth publishing. Occasionally one opens a question we would probably not have reached directly.

Those are the ones worth keeping.

Over time, certain moves begin to recur. Perhaps you keep noticing transformations, contradictions or thresholds. Perhaps you repeatedly borrow from theater, biology, or games. Perhaps your concepts keep leading back to autonomy, dignity, curiosity, or choice.

Those repetitions may tell you more about your intellectual territory than a list of content pillars does. It also may indicate your mental patterns, your preferences, and your blind zones.

Content then does more than demonstrate expertise.

There is a simple way to try things out.

The method itself is small:

Combine → Observe → Extract → Transfer → Select

• Combine two distant things.
• Observe what actually happens between them.
• Extract the properties created by their relationship.
• Transfer those properties into territories.
• Select the meanings worth developing.

The result doesn't have to become content. It might become a product mechanic, a workshop exercise, a question for clients, a visual language, a framework, or simply an idea worth keeping around.

Once you discover that a sponge and honey can generate twelve directions, it's tempting to turn all twelve into posts. That would rather miss the point.

The value of a creative concept isn't how much content we can squeeze out of it. It's that it gives us another way into a problem.

Experts spend years learning to see their field accurately. They learn its models, vocabulary, accepted questions and usual routes from problem to solution.

That expertise is valuable. It can also make certain relationships predictable.

Something from outside the field can disturb them. A sponge. A film scene. A peculiar behaviour in nature. A game mechanic. An object on a museum wall.

We don't know yet whether it belongs. Finding out is the work.

This is different from looking for inspiration. Inspiration is usually harvested: we see something interesting and ask how we might use it.

A thinking tool pushes back.

The sponge didn't merely give us an aesthetic for talking about expertise. Its physical behavior imposed questions. What gets absorbed? What remains? When does capacity run out? What changes when the substance becomes more viscous?

We had to respond to the object rather than simply make it serve an argument.

Perhaps this is why playful thinking and interdisciplinary thinking fit together so naturally. Both temporarily loosen the rules about what is allowed to belong to a problem.

You can put a tennis court inside a kitchen. Use theater to think about strategy. Take a fairy tale seriously as a business model. Ask what honey knows about writing.

Most combinations won't produce anything remarkable. They don't need to.

The point is to increase the number of directions from which a familiar question can be approached.

Do this repeatedly, and people begin to recognize the movement. They may not remember every framework or argument. But they begin to recognize the connections you make, the questions you don't leave alone, and the places you look when the obvious answer isn't enough.

I wouldn't use creative concepts merely to make content more creative. I'd use them to make thinking visible.

What first ideas are worth exploration?