A familiar form can give an unfamiliar idea somewhere comfortable to begin.

New ideas travel further when the container is one people already know: a story shape, a comparison to something ordinary, a format they have read a hundred times. The familiar form absorbs the work of navigation, so attention can go to the content instead of the map. When both the shape and the substance are strange, neither usually gets through. Convention is not the opposite of originality, it is where you spend it.

Next time you have something difficult to explain, borrow a structure your listeners already understand. Keep your inventiveness for the idea itself and let the frame be dull.