The Hidden Draw - Where Creative Ideas Come From
Part 1
Mark Sage - 13 min read - 02/03/2026
It’s not something I realised at the time, but Hong Kong introduced itself to me in two ways.
First, through systems. The Octopus card. The escalators. The density. The mini-buses. The efficiency. The quiet expectation that you keep moving.
And second, through breakfast.
A few weeks after arriving, on a Saturday morning in Sai Ying Pun, I walked into a cha chaan teng alone — determined to eat like a local — and immediately realised I didn’t know the rules of the room.
It was loud, busy, and moving at a pace that didn’t pause for newcomers. A server waved me towards a table that already had people sitting at it. To me, it looked occupied. To her, it was fair game.
I sat down, surrounded by steaming bowls of macaroni and cups of hot milk tea, with a menu on the wall that clearly wasn’t going to rescue me.
Then, without asking, an English menu appeared.
Everything was a set. Eggs, toast, soup noodles, milk tea — bundled into combinations that were probably designed to make ordering easier, but for me, did the opposite. Each option felt like a multiple-choice question.
With little to go on, I picked Set A.
The food arrived almost instantly. Eggs first. Then milk tea, toast, spam and macaroni noodles — steaming hot and super-efficient.
Before I could even work out why spam was still a thing in Hong Kong, I realised I had a more immediate problem.
There was no cutlery on the table.
I looked around. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing. After a slightly awkward pause, I caught the attention of the server. Without a word, she reached under the table and pulled open a hidden drawer, neatly packed with everything I needed.
Space-efficient and obvious — once you knew it was there.
Then I realised I didn’t know the last rule — how to pay
Nobody charged me when I ordered, and no bill appeared. Instead, I was left with a small slip of paper with two indecipherable characters and a tea stain — more prescription than receipt. Only when I stood up did I notice the cashier desk by the door. I handed over my “doctor’s note”, tapped my Octopus card, and that was that.
None of this was difficult.
But all of it was unfamiliar.
I wasn’t learning breakfast. I was learning the city. The rules were everywhere, but invisible until you needed them.
We all carry these scripts with us — mental models that help us make sense of the world and move through it efficiently. Most of the time they work beautifully. Reducing friction and letting us act without conscious effort.
Occasionally, though, the world refuses to behave as expected.
That mismatch can surprise us. It can disorient us. And sometimes it can do something more powerful.
It can inspire us.
When a familiar situation stops fitting our mental model, we’re forced to see it differently. Our preconceived assumptions loosen, our mental frames crack, and new ways of thinking become possible.
That moment — when the old script no longer applies — is where insight begins.
And insight is the raw material of design.
I’ve always been intrigued by how new ideas come about, and what conditions help to foster creativity. In loyalty and marketing design, clients expect novelty — something that stands out — yet so many programmes look like a copy-paste of the last one.
So how do you enable this creativity?
I often come back to the phrase “it’s easier to critique than to create”. Not as an insult — just a reality. Creating something genuinely new, something that solves a problem in a novel way, is hard. There’s no standard process, no perfect team structure, no checklist that leads you into originality.
When it happens, it can feel like a cognitive spark — sudden, mysterious, almost magical.
But originality rarely arrives by committee. Meetings can refine ideas, but the leap usually happens elsewhere — not through facilitated workshops or endless flip charts, but inside an individual mind, bringing order from chaos.
In The Eureka Factor, John Kounios and Mark Beeman put it bluntly: “The basic truth is that ideas originate in individual brains. Individual creativity must therefore be thought of as a precious resource to be sought and cultivated.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean creativity belongs only to lone geniuses in darkened rooms — as the saying goes, success has many fathers.
Good ideas do emerge through the efforts of others, through the paths they’ve already forged, the platforms they’ve created, the work they’ve brought into the world. As The Eureka Factor notes, “groups of people can inspire, refine, and implement ideas.”
How creativity actually works though is worth exploring, because in loyalty, design is the difference between a programme that changes behaviour and one that just hands out points.
Adjacent Possible
If our aim is to create something new — something compelling — then we really need to understand how creativity works in practice. Stepping away from the standard playbook to add a flash of brilliance.
The word Eureka has come to mean exactly that — a flash of brilliance arriving from nowhere. Whilst usually attributed to Archimedes in his bathtub in 3rd-century BCE Syracuse, like the process of ideation itself, it’s often misunderstood.
Many people imagine the bath itself as the trigger — the opportunity to relax and unwind, allowing ideas to emerge. That’s partly true, but it misses what actually matters in the story.
Archimedes had been set a problem, which was how to measure the volume of an irregular object — in this case, to test the purity of gold in a crown. Given the shape, it was near impossible to calculate using the methods of the day.
The solution arrived in the bath, not because he was relaxing, but because his mind was already primed with the problem.
As he stepped into the water, he noticed displacement. It was an everyday occurrence — something that had happened countless times before. But this time, it landed differently. The water wasn’t just an event. It was a clue.
That’s the adjacent possible. Something sitting right next to what you already know, waiting for the moment it becomes meaningful.
Steven Johnson popularised the term in Where Good Ideas Come From, drawing on the work of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
The idea is simply that at any moment, some things are possible and others aren’t. Innovation doesn’t leap arbitrarily into the future and instead moves one step at a time, into spaces just beyond what already exists. Doors don’t appear all at once. They appear as you move forward — often just in the next room.
Crucially, the adjacent possible is invisible until close enough to see it.
Archimedes probably couldn’t have invented calculus in the bath. But he could notice displacement because it sat adjacent to the problem he’d already been wrestling with. An insight so profound that legend has him running through the streets shouting “Εὕρηκα!” — I have found it.
Not a recommended habit, but it captures something important — the power of connecting seemingly unrelated things.
And it didn’t happen by chance.
That observation only mattered because of Archimedes’ domain knowledge. He understood geometry, density, and weight. His thinking was simply constrained by the assumption that volume had to be calculated.
The bath didn’t give him knowledge. It removed a constraint.
Like a jigsaw with most of the pieces already in place — and then suddenly seeing where the missing piece fits.
Role of Knowledge
More than two thousand years later, creativity still works the same way. Take Zipline, founded in 2014. Today it runs an autonomous drone logistics network across multiple continents. Their breakthrough didn’t begin with drones; it began with noticing something in an adjacent domain.
The founders were roboticists. They understood intimately why robotics struggled to scale. Sensors were expensive, compute was fragile, and systems were unreliable — those constraints were real.
Then, almost quietly, the world changed.
By 2014, smartphones had become ubiquitous. In the process, they’d turned compute, GPS, sensors, cameras, connectivity, and batteries into cheap, reliable, mass-produced commodities. Robotics hadn’t suddenly improved. The inputs had.
That was the bathwater moment.
In the podcast Moonshots, founder Keller Rinaudo put it like this:
“I think one of the fundamental realizations we had was that the slow progress of robotics was due to just hardware being expensive and not very good. And we realized that a lot of the components that go into a smartphone are the fundamental components that you need to make a good robot.”
So despite almost every expert telling them they were idiots — “there is no chance you’re going to be able to build a vehicle that flies at all… you’ll never be able to make it reliable” — they saw something different.
Not because of a random flash of brilliance, but because they knew the domain well enough to recognise when a constraint had disappeared.
Seeing the adjacent possible in the smartphone supply chain allowed them to see how the hardware barrier in robotics had dropped away. But notice the key point — the adjacent possible was only visible because of their foundational knowledge.
To unlock new innovations, you don’t just need imagination —
You need fluency.
You need enough depth to know where the domain truly bends — and where it breaks. Enough experience to distinguish a hard constraint from an inherited assumption, and enough technical literacy to notice when the world has changed under your feet.
This is where a lot of corporate “innovation theatre” goes wrong.
Companies form a taskforce. Pick a “coalition of the willing.” Fill a room with people who have opinions and energy. Hand them a whiteboard and a stack of sticky notes. Then ask them to design something genuinely novel.
What they usually design is something familiar, re-labelled.
Not because they lack creativity, but because they don’t yet have the depth to see the adjacent possible.
In loyalty, this shows up constantly.
A team of smart generalists will default to what they know — points, tiers, vouchers, campaigns, birthday treats, “exclusive benefits”. They’ll reproduce whatever they’ve experienced personally as members, and the output will feel comforting because it’s built from an existing script.
But if you’re trying to build a programme that actually changes behaviour, “comforting” is rarely the goal.
The uncomfortable truth is that originality has prerequisites, and without deep domain knowledge, most adjacent possibilities just look like noise.
The bath doesn’t create the idea. The bath reveals it.
Vision Unlock
Knowledge alone doesn’t guarantee creativity. Deep domain expertise is necessary, but it isn’t always sufficient on its own.
In loyalty, you see this often. A company brings in seasoned consultants or vendors — people who’ve launched programmes before. That experience is valuable as it prevents basic mistakes and helps avoid expensive dead-ends.
But the experience still tends to optimise for the same scripts — and you end up back with a copy-paste programme.
True innovation usually needs something extra — a catalyst.
Most often, that catalyst is a strong goal — a vision with enough ambition to force a re-evaluation of constraints.
Zipline is a great example. They were told their drone idea was a non-starter. Industry veterans insisted “you’ll never get regulatory approval, no customer will sign a contract, and in California you’ll never design something that works at scale”.
But Zipline’s vision was bigger than California.
When your goal is to “build a robotic logistics system for Earth”, you get to choose where you begin. Where others saw blockers, they saw a different starting point. Rwanda offered speed, access, permission — and, crucially, it changed the constraint set.
Across decades of cognitive science and real-world innovation, one pattern shows up repeatedly — insight tends to arrive when constraints change.
The Eureka Factor captures this neatly: “Every time your circumstances change, so do your glasses. That’s how a change in context can help you see things in new ways.”
Sometimes the change is external such as a new technology, a new regulation, a new distribution channel, or a new consumer behaviour.
Sometimes it’s internal like a shift in budget, a deadline, a crisis, a strategic pivot.
But the mechanism is similar. A meaningful change in circumstances forces the mind to stop optimising within the same invisible frame — and to re-represent the problem.
That’s why vision matters so much.
A strong vision doesn’t just provide intent. It applies pressure. It makes incremental improvement feel insufficient. It breaks the comfort of “good enough” and forces you to test which constraints are real — and which ones you’ve been obeying out of habit.
The Apollo programme is a textbook case. The vision of landing a man on the moon within a decade didn’t invent rocketry from scratch. It recombined existing technologies under a new constraint — time — and a new standard of reliability.
The opposite is also true. When constraints aren’t challenged, we tend to box ourselves in.
If you’ve ever re-pitched as an incumbent agency, you know the feeling. You don’t just carry knowledge; you carry the weight of what you believe is feasible — operationally, financially, politically. You start defending the existing shape of the solution before you’ve even finished hearing the brief.
Your competitors don’t have that problem.
They benefit from ignorance. From a lack of self-imposed constraints. From fresh eyes and fewer inherited assumptions. They interpret the brief differently, price differently, propose differently.
Their ideas feel lighter. Their solution seems novel.
They win the business.
I learned this the hard way years ago when we were re-pitching an airport loyalty scheme we’d been running for almost a decade. Our experience didn’t help us. It trapped us. We could see every problem before we could see any possibility.
That trap has a name — the Einstellung effect — Abraham Luchins, trained in the Gestalt tradition, showed how the pull of a familiar solution can block a better one.
Gestalt psychology explains that people don’t fail at problems because they lack information or intelligence, but because they’re caught inside an invisible frame. The elements of the solution are often right there — but organised in the wrong way.
Creativity doesn’t come from trying harder. It comes from the moment the frame collapses and the problem is represented differently.
What feels like a flash of brilliance is often just the sudden removal of the frame boxing us in — a constraint we didn’t realise we were obeying.
This is why ambition matters. Not as corporate theatre, but as a cognitive tool. A strong vision smashes through the invisible frame that keeps ideas polite and predictable.
Archimedes didn’t discover displacement because he was relaxed. He discovered it because a hard problem had made him ready to see it.
Zipline didn’t succeed because they were brave enough to ignore experts. They succeeded because they saw that the constraint set had changed.
Whether we’re talking about ancient physics, modern robotics, or loyalty design, the pattern holds. Innovation isn’t free exploration, it’s constraint collapse — usually driven by a depth of ambition.
However, even then, creativity isn’t guaranteed. Knowledge helps you see. Vision helps you reframe.
But there’s still another ingredient in the mix — inquisitiveness.
Works of Bricolage
New ideas rarely come from blue-sky thinking. More often, they come from standing at the edge of what already exists and noticing what can now be combined.
That’s where the adjacent possible stops being a concept and becomes a working practice.
In the book Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson describes ideas as “works of bricolage” — built from whatever materials happen to be lying around:
“We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape… they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.”
The “garage” matters.
This is the part people skip when they talk about innovation; they imagine creativity as invention and something wholly original — a clean break from what came before.
In practice, it’s usually recombination.
You take the components you already have — concepts, patterns, interfaces, mechanics, business models — and you assemble them into a new arrangement that solves a problem in a new way.
The novelty isn’t in the parts. It’s in the configuration.
Kounios makes a similar point in The Eureka Factor, saying “How you think about something is determined not only by your past experiences and habits but also by the current state of your vast network of associations.”
Your network of associations is your raw material. It’s what your mind has available to connect.
Which brings us to a less romantic, more practical truth about creativity —
If you don’t ingest ideas, you can’t recombine them.
Gary Klein, in Seeing What Others Don’t, argues that you can increase insights by increasing exposure. In nearly 80% of the insight examples he reviewed, the ability to make connections was a key ingredient.
In other words, inquisitiveness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a strategy.
If you stay trapped inside your own domain, your garage stays small. You might become highly competent, even world-class, but your materials will be limited to the same familiar set of parts. Your output will trend towards optimisation rather than invention.
This is why loyalty design so often stagnates.
Many programmes are designed by people who know loyalty only as consumers. Their garage contains the same items — points, tiers, coupons, birthday treats, “exclusive access”, maybe a spin-the-wheel if they’re feeling adventurous. The result is predictable, because the ingredients are predictable.
To design something genuinely distinctive, you need a bigger garage.
Not just more loyalty examples.
More adjacent examples. Looking across gaming, social media, payments, subscriptions, habit-forming products, behavioural science, community design, status systems, marketplaces, even architecture and service operations.
This is bricolage at work. Collecting usable parts from other worlds, so that when a constraint collapses, you have something to build with.
There’s one more counterintuitive piece. You don’t access the adjacent possible by thinking harder — you access it by moving.
Movement changes what becomes visible.
You build far enough forward that new options appear. You test, ship, connect the next piece — and in doing so, you create the conditions for the next insight. The adjacent possible isn’t a place you can visit in your imagination. It’s something that reveals itself as you approach.
That’s why moments of insight often feel sudden. Not because they came from nowhere, but because the final step is small. The groundwork — the knowledge, the vision, the exposure — has already been laid.
In practice, the sequence often looks like this:
1. Vision creates pressure
2. Pressure exposes gaps
3. Gaps force you outward — into adjacency
4. Progress makes the next door visible
This isn’t an all-hands meeting with a flip chart.
You can’t relax constraints if you don’t understand the domain deeply enough to know which constraints matter. You can’t solve gaps if you don’t have any adjacent materials to draw on. You can’t reveal the next door if you never start walking.
To butcher a common phrase, you need to be a jack of some trades — but a master of one.
Creativity isn’t magic. It’s preparation colliding with movement.
A hidden drawer — obvious once you know where to reach.
Thats the theory for how creativity works — knowledge, pressure, adjacency, movement.
In Part 2, I’ll show how this played out for us within yuu Rewards — when we used borrowed scripts from social media to build a loyalty product that eventually started behaving like a platform.