Exactly. I worked at a place where the majority of dev teams had little to no automated tests. Getting them to write tests was near impossible due to it 'taking too much time away from features and bug fixes'.
One team adopted TDD and forced themselves to do it for a year. They admitted it slowed their overall dev-cycle down a ton, but they ended up learning a lot about how to build a well designed API. I think more internal documentation about good design emerged from that then them evangelizing TDD.
If that's really the case then why not drop the ceremony and simply TTD to, "write some tests first."
Sure. If you actually do it.
The problem with most companies, and the reason why I think that TDD 'works' is that it forces you to right some tests, any tests at all.
Many people, if they don't write the test first, will just end up not making any tests at all.