Ideation Decay: The Deepening Weakness in Today’s Creative Process
There’s this episode of Mad Men, called The Suitcase, that’s always stuck with me.
It’s 1965. Copywriter Peggy Olson is sharing ideas for a campaign for Samsonite with her boss and Creative Director, Don Draper. But he dismisses them all: nope, nope, nope. Peggy is frustrated as she was just leaving the office for the evening. Now she feels compelled to go back to the drawing board.
Night falls and an idea still hasn’t stuck. They argue about the creative process, where Don says he needs and takes the “kernels” of Peggy’s many ideas and turns them into a final campaign. They spend an all-nighter on the hunt for that kernel. And somewhere through exhaustion, booze, and not knowing ‘what sounds good anymore’, Don finds it.
But it’s not 1965 anymore. The ideation process has evolved, and I would argue, has started to decay since 2023. We are losing the messy, curious, very human process of ideation in favour of streamlined and immediate automation. We are biased to action before thinking things through. And we risk skipping the part that makes creative strategies work and ideas resonate.
The most at-risk stages of the ideation process
In design thinking, the ideation process is a five-stage framework used to solve problems or uncover new opportunities:
Empathize: Research the ‘need’ behind your idea
Define: Create a clear problem statement to address.
Ideate: Explore a range of ideas and solutions to the problem.
Prototype: Create a quick version of your idea to test.
Test: Gather feedback and iterate on a final solution.
If I look at my own work in the content world, I see ideation decay creeping into all stages, but none more so than the ‘empathize’ and ‘ideation’ stages.
1. Empathize: Decay begins when we don’t understand context
In the content world we craft an objective based on a real problem. We identify what’s missing, and where there are opportunities to close the gap through education and storytelling. For example, we may create content that helps aid onboarding, or clarifies something critical.
When companies rely on AI to fill those gaps, that’s where decay begins. AI can assist in pointing you where to look for an answer, but it can’t replace the sense-making that comes from engaging directly with people or a product.
Because most of the context that defines why we create doesn’t live in a clean document that reveals all — it lives in people’s heads. Insights are trapped in conversations, notebook scribbles, and intuition built from experience.
So when you’re in this first discovery stage of ideation, don’t lean on AI — think like a journalist instead. Speak to the right people, show curiosity, and collaborate to find the right story. AI can help organize what already exists, but it can’t extract what’s hidden and nuanced. We have to do that.
2. Ideation: Decay impacts unique ways to frame our ideas
Ideation decay sets in when we use AI like a million monkeys at a million typewriters. We rush it to spit out ideas before that ‘sound human’ before we’ve asked our own humanity how to frame our idea.
AI doesn’t have the lived experience to frame our ideas in unique ways. When I start writing a content piece, I may have already captured why I’m writing it and the broad topic, but I also ask: What’s my framing? How can I make this piece unique? How might it be memorable?
For example, this piece opens with a Mad Men reference. It’s my way of comparing how the deep exploration once needed to come up with a unique idea has been replaced with the creative crutch of AI.
There are ways to use AI while retaining the more human side of our writing, but healthy use of these tools are in flux. The consequence is homogenous content, when our social feeds and the writing you read online all feel dull and the same. We’ve become banner blind to templated text that once worked to engage audiences. And who can blame us? Now, more content is written by AI than a human being.
Source: Graphite.io
I don’t know about you, but what stands out in my feed and inboxes are pieces that surprise me: that tell a story to frame the concept, or capture a human moment, or reveal a secret that was earned through experience.
The Fix: Workshops and ‘ideas everywhere’
I’m not saying ideation is dead. But if we’re not careful, the decay will spread to creative workflows until they all start and end with ‘just ask AI’. If we want to reclaim the ideation process, there are two core fixes: playful workshops, and a curious and slow-moving mind:
Workshops: Structured workshops and brainstorm sessions get the best out of all the diverse minds in the room and force instinctive and focused thinking. One I rely on most is the Lightning Decision Jam, as you can combine divergent and convergent thinking: create many ideas, and then analyse them for their effort to create and estimated impact.
Ideas from everywhere: The slippery thing about creativity is that it very rarely gets summoned willingly. Many times, we need to incubate the information, delay, and let the brain do its slow, quiet work in the background. David Ogilvy's advice was to “Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.” Then, an epiphany can arrive in the shower, while walking, or in the middle of a customer interview.
This type of slower, more deliberate, more playful thinking is how we can get away from the rush of needing a great idea now. And often times, what we need just falls into our lap.
Saving the ideation process
This article came after stewing on that Mad Men episode for weeks, and how it compares to today’s creative processes. I then let all my thoughts go into a 10-minute voice note, transcribed it, and then fed it into AI to help structure the logic. After, I rewrote, adding nuance and my own personal touch.
But too often, we jump straight from problem to action because our tools make it so easy to get that tough ‘ideation’ stage out of the way. But without thinking things through, we lose the ability to differentiate between what truly resonates and what’s good enough.
So if we want to reverse the decay of the ideation stage, we need to slow down. Reintroduce curiosity, exploration, and sometimes a little bit of procrastination.
Without them, we risk losing not just good ideas in the future… but the ability to have ideas of our own.
