I've lost count of how many times I've heard the words that kill ideas stone dead: "Can you put that in a deck?" Sounds reasonable. Responsible, even. But what it actually does is fire the clay before the idea has been fully shaped.

What I Mean by "Wet Clay"

Wet clay is the most important part of any creative ideation process. When I'm innovating, building new ideas, processes, systems, the material needs to stay malleable. I can add bits, take bits off, push things around. The overall form starts to take shape and I can see where it's going long before the finished details are added. This is where the real work happens, where bad directions get abandoned quickly and good ones get room to breathe. The clay stage isn't a nice-to-have. It's where ideas actually become ideas rather than just descriptions of ideas.

The problem is that most organisations want to skip straight past this bit. They want the finished thing now, or at least a convincing facsimile of the finished thing that can be circulated and commented on. What they don't realise is that firing the clay too early doesn't speed things up. It just means you end up with something rigid that nobody can improve.

AI in the wrong hands can exacerbate this issue. It's never been easier to generate something that looks finished within minutes. A polished hero image, a confident headline, a layout that feels complete. The tool delivers exactly what was asked for, the organisation mistakes delivery speed for thinking speed, and the clay gets fired before anyone's really shaped it. The AI becomes an accomplice to impatience.

Why Decks Are Kilns

A PowerPoint deck isn't a thinking tool. It's a presentation format, designed to communicate finished thoughts to people who weren't in the room when those thoughts were formed.

The moment I put an idea into a deck, several things happen at once. It becomes fixed, because slides have edges and bullet points demand completion. The format itself insists on resolution. It becomes hierarchical too, forcing me to choose a "lead slide" and "supporting points" before the idea has earned any kind of architecture.

Then there's the defensiveness that creeps in. Once I've put something in a deck, my job shifts from exploration to protection. Questions stop feeling like contributions and start feeling like attacks. And because it's now sendable, it gets interpreted without me there to add the hesitations, the "what ifs," the productive uncertainty that made it interesting.

The deck doesn't document my thinking. It embalms it.

Wet Clay Wants Different Tools

Ideas in formation need formats that stay soft, that invite handling, that make revision feel like progress rather than failure.

I like to use "walls" instead of slides. Physical or digital surfaces where I can move elements around, cluster them, contradict them. Miro boards work well, Figma is something I open every day. So do actual walls with actual paper with real people in real rooms, I hasten to add. The point is spatial thinking without the tyranny of sequential logic.

Conversations beat presentations every time. The best creative development I've experienced happens in dialogue, where my half-formed thoughts collide with other half-formed thoughts and something unexpected emerges. Presentations are just monologues dressed up as meetings.

I've learned to stay in questions rather than rushing to statements. When I ask "What if the hero is actually the problem?" the clay stays wet. The moment I declare "The hero represents the customer's journey," I've fired it.

I create ugly artefacts. Scribbled diagrams, voice notes, annotated screenshots. Things that couldn't possibly be sent to a client or escalated to leadership. Their unsendability is the feature, keeping them in my workshop where they belong. And I work on multiple versions simultaneously. Not "v1, v2, v3" but three genuinely different directions sitting next to each other, none of them "right." The creative tension between them generates the actual idea.

The Template Trap

Every organisation I've worked with has one of these. The "brand deck template," complete with forty-seven slides of approved layouts, mandated fonts, and that inexplicable gradient the design team signed off on in 2019. Here's what I've realised about templates. They're designed for the least creative person in the room, and that's not an insult. It's literally their purpose. They exist so that anyone, regardless of design skill or creative confidence, can produce something that won't embarrass the brand in a client meeting.

The problem comes when templates become the starting point for creative development rather than the end point for creative communication. When "open the template" is step one, I've already constrained my thinking to what fits in those boxes. The template becomes the shape of the idea, rather than letting the idea find its own shape first.

Templates are packaging. They're not workshops.

Figma Is Not Just for Designers

There's a quiet revolution happening in how I develop ideas, and it's sitting in a browser tab most people think isn't for them. Figma, and tools like it, are collaborative canvases that stay perpetually editable. Nothing is ever truly "done." I can have six people looking at the same board, moving things around, adding comments, branching off in different directions. The format actively resists conclusion.

Mention Figma to most marketing or strategy people and they'll say "oh, that's for the designers." Which is a bit like saying whiteboards are only for people who can draw.

What makes Figma powerful for my creative development isn't the design capability. It's the infinite canvas. Ideas can sit next to each other without hierarchy. I can zoom out to see the whole landscape or zoom in to obsess over a detail. I can duplicate a direction and brutalise the copy without losing the original. I can leave things visibly unfinished because the format doesn't demand polish.

The barrier isn't technical skill. It's permission. Once I gave myself permission to work in these spaces, messily and incompletely, without worrying about whether the boxes lined up, something shifted. The clay stays wetter for longer.

When Only a Deck Will Do

All of that said, sometimes I need a deck. Not because it's the best format, but because it's the expected one.

Senior stakeholders have habitual expectations built over thousands of presentations. They know how to read a deck, where to look for the recommendation, how to pattern-match against other decks they've seen, when to interrupt and when to wait. For first contact and formal pitches, giving them a different format isn't brave. It's inconsiderate.

But there's a shift happening. Once you're past that initial pitch, once investors are actually engaged, I'm seeing more founders move away from static slides entirely. Rippling famously raised $45 million with an investor memo instead of a deck, and they've used that approach through multiple rounds since. Others are building interactive Notion pages where investors can navigate non-linearly, or scroll-based presentations that behave more like websites than slide decks. Tools like Storydoc and Gamma are turning pitches into explorable experiences rather than linear presentations.

This isn't just novelty. It's recognition that different moments in the fundraising process need different formats. The deck gets you in the door. The memo or interactive site lets investors dig deeper on their own terms, without you there to walk them through it.

The skill I've developed isn't avoiding decks entirely. It's knowing when the clay is ready to be fired, then choosing the right kiln for the moment. For that crucial first meeting, this still means holding the format until my thinking is complete. I build in Figma, argue in memos, workshop on walls, and only translate to PowerPoint when I've genuinely landed somewhere.

I treat the deck as translation, not creation. The deck expresses my idea but doesn't develop it. If I'm still having thoughts while building slides, I'm not ready to build slides. I use the template with intention. Now it becomes an asset, the packaging that helps my fully-formed idea land with credibility. The gradient doesn't matter because my thinking is solid.

And I accept that some compression means loss. A deck will never capture everything I know. That's fine. It captures enough for the decision to be made. The rest lives in my head, ready for questions, or in those richer, more interactive formats I can share once they're actually interested.

AI Novocaine

I've noticed a subtler problem with AI in my creative development. It numbs the edges. Every interesting idea I have has jagged edges. Tensions, bits that don't quite resolve, propositions that are almost contradictory, tones that are almost too much. These jagged edges are often where the value lives. The things that make people react, remember, care.

AI tools have a smoothing bias. Language models, image generators, even sophisticated creative suites. They're trained on consensus, which means they know what "good" looks like across millions of examples. They know what average looks like with very high confidence.

When I run my idea through AI, it often comes back smoother. The contradictions get resolved. The tension is released. The thing that was almost too much becomes just enough. And it's worse. This is what I call AI Novocaine. The numbing of exactly the qualities that made my idea interesting.

I see it in copy I've "refined" until it sounds like everything else. In concepts that were initially provocative but got smoothed into acceptability. In brand voices that started with character and ended up "professional, approachable, and trustworthy." My defence is to notice what's being lost. To specifically protect the jagged edges. To ask "what was uncomfortable about this before, and where did that discomfort go?" If I can't find the edge, the AI may have sanded it off.

The wet clay metaphor isn't about being precious or slow. It's about me using the right tools at the right time for the right audiences.

Template decks, Figma boards, written memos, AI prototypes. None of these are good or bad in themselves. They're appropriate or inappropriate depending on where I am in the process and who's in the room.

My job as a creative leader is to protect the shaping phase from the pressure to conclude, while knowing exactly when a conclusion is needed. To keep clay wet until it's found its form, then fire it with confidence.

...and to never, ever open the brand template until my thinking is done.

AI Novocaine (n.): The smoothing bias of AI drafting tools that sands the jagged edges off an idea: the tensions, the contradictions, the bits that are almost too much, which is exactly where the value lives. An anaesthetic for the creative process; it doesn't prevent the loss, it just lets you stop noticing it. See also: Wet Clay.

Asked at the counter

What is AI Novocaine? The numbing of exactly the qualities that make an idea interesting. AI tools are trained on consensus, so they know what average looks like with very high confidence, and an idea run through them comes back smoother: contradictions resolved, tension released, the thing that was almost too much becomes just enough. The name fits because, like the dentist's needle, you don't feel the loss happening.

Why do strategy decks kill ideas? A deck is a presentation format, not a thinking tool, and the moment an idea goes into one it becomes fixed, hierarchical and defended. Slides have edges, bullet points demand completion, and once something is sendable it gets interpreted without you there to add the hesitations and the "what ifs". The deck doesn't document the thinking. It embalms it.

How do you stop AI flattening your writing? Notice what's being lost, and specifically protect the jagged edges. Ask "what was uncomfortable about this before, and where did that discomfort go?" If you can't find the edge, the AI may have sanded it off, and the fix is to put it back, not to refine again.