How can you get people to take action at all? It is all too easy, even with the best intentions, to defer decisions, delay, and avoid committing scarce resources. When your success requires the coordinated action of many people, delay by a single individual can have a cascade effect, giving others an excuse not to proceed. You must therefore eliminate inaction as an option.
One approach is to set up action-forcing events —events that induce people to make commitments or take actions. Those who make commitments should be locked into timetables with incremental implementation milestones. Meetings, review sessions, and deadlines can all sustain momentum: Regular meetings to review progress, and tough questioning of those who fail to reach agreed-on goals, increase the psychological pressure to follow through.
Be careful, though: Avoid pressing for closure until you are confident the balance of forces acting on key people is tipping your way. Otherwise, you could succeed in forcing them to take a stand, but inadvertently push them toward the “opponent” side of the ledger. Again, you need to rely on your conversations with the people involved and with your “intelligence network” to get a sense of where the situation stands.