Have you ever wondered why perfectly crafted, multi-million-dollar corporate strategies completely fail to launch?
I see this constantly when organisations try to drive transformation. Leaders emerge from closed-door offsites and hand their teams a flawless, beautifully bound blueprint. The team nods politely, and the blueprint dies in a drawer.
Why? Because human beings are wired to support what they help create.
The labour leads to love
In 2011, researchers from Harvard Business School and Duke University published a landmark study on what they called the IKEA effect. When people built a simple storage box themselves, they valued it significantly more — in one experiment, they were willing to pay around 63% more — than for the same box built by someone else.
The effort itself creates attachment. The labour leads to love.
The egg that saved a cake mix
There's a famous story — often told in marketing classes, and debated by historians — about Betty Crocker's instant cake mix in the 1950s. The original mix only needed water. It was perfectly engineered, completely foolproof, and, so the story goes, a commercial flop.
It was too easy. People felt no ownership over the final product. The fix, the story says, was to remove the powdered eggs and ask people to crack and add their own fresh eggs. Suddenly they weren't just executing a mindless task — they were taking part in creating something.
Whether or not the egg alone saved the cake mix, the principle it illustrates is well supported: people value, protect and defend what they have helped to make.
Toyota put the egg in every worker's hands
This same dynamic drives organisational transformation. While traditional automakers treated factory workers as cogs expected to execute rigid, top-down processes, Toyota gave every frontline worker the authority to pull the andon cord — to stop the line to fix a problem or suggest an improvement.
The workers weren't just assembling cars. They were co-creating the production system itself. Ownership rose, and Toyota's quality became legendary. (Try the ritual: The Andon Pull.)
Compliance or commitment
Through our work at Budaya helping organisations transform their cultures, the pattern is consistent: top-down mandates breed compliance, but co-creation breeds commitment.
If you want your team to care about the new process, stop handing them a fully baked cake. Tear up the perfect document. Give them the flour, the sugar and a stack of sticky notes, and let them make a mess.
It won't be a perfect process. But it will be theirs. And they will fight to make it work.
Leave the egg out on purpose
A practical way to start:
- Bring a draft that's deliberately unfinished — roughly 70% done, with the "why" crystal clear and the "how" left open.
- Name what's fixed and what's open. People need to know which decisions are genuinely theirs to shape.
- Let the team build the rest — in the room, on sticky notes, with real influence over the result.
- Show what changed because of them. Ownership collapses the moment people realise their input was decorative.
How often are you accidentally robbing your team of the chance to crack the egg?
Watch the video: Why multi-million-dollar strategies fail to launch · Try the ritual: Crack the Egg
