Or: how to activate Drivechain.
Imagine a world in which there are 10 different bitcoind flavors, as described in bitcoind decentralization.
Now how do you enable a soft-fork?
Flavor 1 enables it. Seeing that nothing bad happened, flavor 2 enables it. Then flavor 3 enables it.
And so on.
When what is perceived by miners to be a big chunk of support for the proposal, a miner can try to mine a block that contains the new feature.
No need for a flag day or a centralized decision making process that depends on one or two courageous leaders to enable a timer.
This probably sounds silly, and maybe is.