Everyone is a project manager now. Which is another way of saying nobody is.

Somewhere in your organisation, right now, there is a person who has recently been told they are leading a transformation programme.

They didn't apply for the job. Nobody sat them down and explained what it involved. They found out they had it somewhere between agenda item three and the biscuits.

This is not unusual. It has become, in fact, the standard way organisations handle their most important work.

In 2021, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez wrote in Harvard Business Review that we had reached a turning point in the history of business. Projects – not operations – had become the primary engine of value creation. Every company, in every industry, was now in the business of change. And change, it turns out, is delivered through projects.

He was right. And in the years since, organisations have responded with admirable energy. They have trained project managers. Built project management offices. Adopted frameworks with names that sound like European rivers. Governance has improved. Timelines have grown clearer.

The failure rate has not moved.

The Standish Group, which has tracked project outcomes across thousands of organisations for three decades, reports that only around one in three projects succeeds in delivering what it promised. The Project Management Institute puts a financial figure on this: organisations waste $97 million for every billion dollars invested, simply due to poor project performance. McKinsey's research on large transformation programmes finds that roughly 70% fail to achieve their objectives.

You might find this puzzling. More training, better processes, similar outcomes. What, exactly, is being missed?

The answer is not another framework.

Consider what happened during the pandemic. Organisations everywhere had to move at extraordinary speed – building digital infrastructures, reconfiguring supply chains, launching new services in days rather than years. Everyone, as Nieto-Rodriguez noted, became a project leader "whether they recognised it or not."

That’s the problem.

When project leadership is everyone's responsibility, it has a tendency to become nobody's. The operations director who finds herself accountable for a digital transformation she didn't commission. The department head running three workstreams in the time left over from his actual job. The talented, willing, thoroughly well-intentioned manager who has been empowered to lead a strategic initiative, equipped with a slide template, and left largely to get on with it.

These are not incompetent people. They are, in many cases, exceptional people attempting an impossible job. The impossibility is structural, not personal. Projects fail not because of bad intentions but because of divided attention – and divided attention, in organisations under pressure, is very nearly universal.

Here is what the evidence consistently shows. Projects succeed when someone is genuinely, professionally, entirely accountable for the outcome. When the person leading the work has done it before – has seen how this kind of thing goes wrong, and has both the skill and the authority to prevent it. When there is one person, not a committee or a collection of part-time commitments, who wakes up in the morning with a single clear purpose.

That person exists. Not always in your organisation. Not always on your payroll.

But they are available.

Escape Company provides organisations with freelance project managers – professionals who have built careers from precisely the kind of complexity that makes project leadership so difficult to do well, and so costly to do badly. Not coordinators. Not safe pairs of hands. People who treat the word accountable as a description rather than a decoration.

Everyone is a project manager now.

The organisations that thrive in the project economy are the ones that make sure the right people are leading the right things.

It sounds obvious. In our experience, it mostly isn't.