The Zero Effect Brainstorm
Stop hunting for the one right idea and start hunting for anything at all — then your hit rate is one hundred percent.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 95%
Elan names this principle explicitly — he calls it the zero effect, after a film from around the late eighties or early nineties in which a character explains it. The input is any creative search; the mechanism is swapping a specific target for an unspecified one; the output is a hundred percent hit rate on 'something', which you then shape. In the Coyote build this is what converted a stalled two-year search into a week where roughly eighty percent of the game got designed, because the pair stopped trying to find the game and started trying to find anything worth another round.
Origin
Elan takes the principle from the film The Zero Effect, in which one scene lays out the car-keys logic. He adopted it as his favourite premise for brainstorming and for early testing, and it is the passage Tim chose as the cold open for this episode.
Core principles
- 01If you search a room for your car keys specifically, your odds are low, because almost everything in that room is not your car keys.
- 02If you search the same room for anything at all, your odds of success are one hundred percent, because you will always find something.
- 03The declaration 'I must find X' is what makes brainstorming painful; removing it is what makes brainstorming a pleasure.
- 04You are allowed to tweak the thing you found later and decide retrospectively that it counts as your car keys.
- 05The operational form is an unlimited series of 'what if' proposals, each answered with 'let's try it' rather than an opinion.
- 06None of the ideas have to work, because you are not scared for all of them to fail — the point is generating something to react to.
- 07Speed of trying beats quality of proposing, so the proposal bar should be low enough that a bad idea costs nothing to say out loud.
How to run it
- 1
Name and then release the specific target
Identify the X you have been insisting on finding — the game, the title, the mechanic — and consciously drop it for the duration of the session. Elan's framing is 'don't lock in your head, I'm looking for this particular thing'.
Pro tip Say it out loud to your collaborators so nobody quietly keeps scoring against the old target.
Watch out Silently keeping the target while pretending to be open is the most common failure; the filter still runs.
- 2
Redefine success as finding something
Adopt the explicit goal of finding anything interesting, on the basis that if you do not care what you find, your chances of success are suddenly one hundred percent.
Pro tip Give yourself permission in advance to reinterpret whatever you find as the thing you were looking for.
- 3
Run an unbounded series of what-ifs
Generate proposals in the form 'what if this card did this' or 'what if we did that', with no defence attached. Elan says you can come up with those all day long.
Pro tip Quantity is the point; the pair generated so many modifiers that cards ended up spread all over the table.
Watch out Attaching a rationale to each what-if slows generation and invites debate instead of testing.
- 4
Answer every proposal with 'let's try it'
Make 'I don't know, let's try it' the standard reply, including to ideas you privately doubt. Elan's response to Tim's attack-card suggestion was exactly that, and it turned out glorious.
Pro tip As long as the answer is always let's try it, Elan says you will one hundred percent find what you are looking for.
Watch out An opinion offered in place of a test is what re-installs the specific target you just dropped.
- 5
Prototype at the cost of a marker
Test physically and immediately. Elan buys blank cards by the thousand on Amazon and scribbles on them with Sharpies; he has also sanded the nubs off dice to hand-write faces.
Pro tip Tim's parallel reference is Stephen Key, who prototypes with construction paper, glue and markers and licenses the results.
Watch out Polishing the prototype re-raises the stakes and reintroduces fear of failure.
- 6
Harvest what was interesting rather than what worked
After each attempt, note the specific moment worth keeping. Tim's feedback style through the whole project was 'I like that moment, I didn't like the rest of it', which let Elan narrow from four hundred notebook games to six worth bringing next time.
Pro tip Interesting fragments compound; whole verdicts do not.
In the wild
Elan's canonical statement of the principle: you have lost your car keys and you are standing in your living room looking for them. The chances of finding them are very low, because there are so many things in that room that are not your car keys. If instead you are trying to find anything, your chances of success are suddenly one hundred percent — you will find something, as long as you do not care what it is that you found, and you can tweak it later and find some way to consider the thing you found your car keys.
→ A reframe that Elan says converts brainstorming from a hunt into a pleasure.
After the Toronto walk, Elan ran home and started scribbling rock, paper and scissors onto blank cards, then began adding modifiers — all players do all blue cards, skip a player after every red card, shout every blue card — with no plan for what the finished game would be. He describes putting all these cards all over the table simply because the challenge got more and more interesting. The pair had been stalled at roughly one percent for months; over the next week they designed about eighty percent of the game.
→ A months-long stall broken in a matter of days, with the core loop of Coyote emerging out of untargeted iteration.
Tim applies the same stake-lowering logic repeatedly: the Legend of Cockpunch NFT project gave him a pretext to write fiction with very low stakes as an intrepid beginner wading into unfamiliar creative waters; his writing rule is two crappy pages per day; and he opened this very episode by telling Elan they were not recording live, so if they really did not like it they could scrap the whole thing.
→ In each case the reduced stakes were what got pen to paper at all.
Common mistakes
Insisting on finding the specific thing
Elan is blunt that the chances of finding your declared X are almost non-existent, because the search space is overwhelmingly made of things that are not X. The insistence, not the difficulty, is what produces the stall.
Answering a what-if with an opinion
The engine of the method is that every proposal gets tested rather than judged. The moment the reply becomes 'I don't think that works', generation collapses back into evaluation and the session stops producing material.
Raising the stakes on the prototype
Tim's rule is to make the stakes super low until you can get started. A prototype that looks finished carries a verdict with it, which is exactly the pressure the zero effect is designed to remove.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early-stage creative or product work where the direction is genuinely unknown and the cost of trying an idea is low.
Not ideal for
Late-stage refinement against a locked spec, where the target genuinely is a specific X and divergence is expensive.
From the transcript
“don't lock in your head, i'm looking for this particular thing. i must find x. i must find x. because the chances that you're going…”
“if instead you are trying to find anything, your chances of success are suddenly at 100%”
“and as long as the answer is always let's try it, you will 100% find what you're looking for”
“as long as you're willing to make that leap, brainstorming becomes a pleasure”
From the episode
#821: My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens