Ideation Decay: The Deepening Weakness in Today’s Creative Processes
There’s this episode of Mad Men, called The Suitcase, that’s always stuck with me.
It’s 1965. Copywriter Peggy Olson is sharing her ideas for a campaign for Samsonite with her boss and Creative Director, Don Draper. He dismisses them all: nope, nope, nope. Peggy is frustrated, as she was just heading out for the evening. But she goes back to the drawing board anyway.
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 ‘which 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’ve started to lose the messy, human process of ideation, in favour of automation. We bias to action before thinking things through, and by doing so, 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, and many other creative fields, we need to craft an objective based on real problems. You identify what’s missing, and where there are chances to close that gap through customer education and storytelling. For example, it may be content that helps aids 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, 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 stage of ideation, don’t lean on AI — think like a journalist or detective instead. Speak to the right people, show curiosity, and get great at collaboration. What matters is extracting what’s hidden and nuanced. AI can help organize what already exists, but it can’t discover. 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 ‘human-led’ ideas before we’ve asked our own humanity: it doesn’t have the lived experience to frame our ideas in unique ways.
When I start writing a piece of content, I may have captured the why before 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 compares how the deep and obsessive exploration needed to come up with an idea has been replaced by using AI as a creative crutch.
There are ways to use AI while retaining humanity in your writing, but this is growing few and far between. The consequence is content homogeneity: where our social feeds and writing feels mostly the same. We’ve become banner blind to templated posts (on LinkedIn, for example) that once worked. And who can blame us if now more content is written from AI now 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 or capture a human moment or reveal a secret that was earned through experience.
The Fix: Workshops and ideas from everywhere
I’m not saying ideation is dead. But if we’re not careful, the decay will spread through to creative workflows until it starts and ends with ‘just ask AI’. If we want to reclaim the ideation process, there are three fixes: playful workshops, curiosity, and 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 plot them against effort-impact.
Ideas from everywhere: The slippery thing about creativity is that it very rarely gets summoned by will. 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 a customer interview.
Saving the ideation process
I’ve got a confession to make.
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. I then rewrote, added nuance, and my personal touch.
But too often now, we jump straight from problem and idea to action because our tools make it so easy. But thinking things through is what gives our writing and ideas meaning. Without it, we lose the ability to differentiate between what resonates and what’s good enough.
So if we want to reverse the decay of the ideation stage, we need to slow down, just a little bit. Reintroduce curiosity, exploration, and sometimes a little bit of procrastination.
Without these steps, we risk losing not just good ideas but the ability to have ideas of our own at all.
