The handover is complete. Why won’t they accept it?

Say the project team has finished everything on the list. The support lead still wants someone to walk her team through what happens if the service fails at two in the morning, after the project specialists have gone.

If you're trying to close the project, that can sound like another excuse to delay.

Psychologist Ellen Langer suggests asking how an action makes sense to the person taking it. What are they trying to do?

Perhaps the support lead is checking whether her team could actually handle that failure. The same request can look rather different when you're the person who'll be responsible for the answer.

That's part of the psychology included in the Delivery Leadership System: understanding what someone is protecting before treating their reluctance as obstruction.

We'd ask what she's not yet confident her team can deal with. We may find the concern is already covered. We may find something missing.