You worked on your plan for weeks. And it gets almost no support

I've seen brilliant campaigns fail because the people behind them were so taken with their memorable message that they forgot to check whether the basics worked. Most of us know the feeling. Put enough work into an idea and it starts to look better every day.

There's a name for that, and a lovely experiment behind it. Michael Norton and colleagues called it the IKEA effect: people value things more when they've made them themselves.

Their first study used about the most boring object you can imagine: a plain black IKEA storage box. People who assembled it themselves bid 78 cents for it. People who were handed the same box ready-made bid 48 cents. Then the researchers tried something more personal.

In the next study, 106 people at an American university took part. Some of them got a sheet of origami paper and an instruction sheet, and folded a frog or a crane. Then they could bid to take their creation home. A second group, who hadn't folded anything, bid on the same amateur frogs and cranes. A third group bid on origami made by two research assistants with a great deal of folding experience.

The makers bid 23 cents for their own work. The outsiders offered 5 cents for exactly the same pieces. To them it was crumpled paper. The expert origami, neat and crisp, went for 27 cents, statistically no different from what the makers bid for their own. In the makers' eyes, their clumsy frog was close to expert work. And, in a small follow-up, they expected others to see it the same way.

That last detail matters for anyone who needs support for a plan.

When you've worked on a plan for weeks, you are the maker. Every page carries your effort, and the IKEA effect does its work. The plan looks better to you than it might to anyone else, and you expect the room to see what you see. They didn't fold it. To them it's somebody else's frog.

So the usual way of winning support works against you. You finish the plan, polish it and present it. The more finished it is, the less there is for anyone else to make.

In the SUE | Influence Framework^© the IKEA effect is a gain: a positive of the behaviour you want. Building something yourself adds value to it, in your own eyes. That gain is available to your audience too, but only if you leave them something to build.

The researchers found one important limit. The effect needed completion. People who built a Lego set and then took it apart lost the extra value. So did people who had to stop before their IKEA box was finished. Labour led to love only when it led somewhere.

The research used boxes, origami and Lego; the step to the workplace is mine. That gives you two design rules for participation.

Give people a part they can finish. A vague invitation to share input won't do it. Give them a real piece with an end: the rollout plan for their own team, the first three steps, the way success will be measured.

And keep what they build. If their part gets rewritten by a steering group a week later, you've recreated something close to the Lego condition: they built it, and it came apart again.

Both rules protect the same gain: authorship. You can't hand that over in a presentation. You can only leave people a real part to make.

It's a humbling thought. The plan you love most may be the one you should present least finished.

Hand them a finished plan, and it stays yours.