Give Them a Hot Tub cover image

Give Them a Hot Tub

Use outrageous features to discover hidden breakthroughs.

Profile image of Luke Hohmann
2006 • 30 min read
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Creativity
Customer Focus
Sensemaking
Vision
Brainstorming

Summary

An outrageous feature induces cognitive dissonance. That’s fancy language for saying that an outrageous feature makes customers uncomfortable. So, they work (mentally) to get rid of the discomfort. The most common ways to deal with the discomfort are rejecting the feature outright, pretending that the feature was never really discussed, or trans-forming the “outrageous” feature into something that isn’t so outrageous. The magic happens during these transformations—they are the things that can create breakthroughs in the product. The Give Them a Hot Tub game encourages you to generate your crazy ideas and let your customers determine just how crazy those ideas really are!

This game is useful if you need to build products that operate in various “extreme” environments, because you typically can’t easily simulate or access the extreme environment. Examples of extreme environments include those that are physically demanding or dangerous or those where the risk of human, societal, or financial damage is high should a failure occur. In these situations, the Give Them a Hot Tub game enables you to safely explore potential solutions for extreme environments.

Game Overview: Several potential product features appear on a shuffled set of note cards, one feature per card. Some of the proposed features are completely outrageous, such as a "crush rocks" setting for a new food blender. Observers note what happens when a customer uncovers one of these outrageous features. The biggest preparation challenge when playing this game is creating features that are extreme enough to cause cognitive dissonance, yet not so extreme as to force customers to reject the game. The facilitator presents each feature to customers and invites them to respond in one of three ways: 1) Accept the feature as is with no changes; 2) Reject the feature outright as something they don't want; 3) Transform the feature into a new feature that is something that they do want. Then ask for explanations for transformations, capturing both the initial outrageous feature and how this feature was ultimately transformed.

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