Half the people. Twice the meetings. A quarter of the progress.

Consider the career of a typical strategic initiative.

It begins with ambition. Someone has identified something important – a transformation, a platform, a new capability the business genuinely needs. Leadership approves it. Resources are committed, in the sense that a number of people are told they will be working on it.

What "working on it" means, in practice, is this: they will attend the project meetings, of which there are many. They will contribute to the documents, when they have time. They will do their best, in the margins of their actual jobs, to move things forward. They are 20% on this initiative, and 20% on three others, and 40% on the operational responsibilities that were never reduced when the project work was added.

The project moves forward. Slowly, and with great effort, and never quite at the pace that everyone agrees it should.

This is not a staffing anomaly. According to Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, writing in Harvard Business Review, it is the norm. Most strategic projects "are run by collections of individuals who each contribute only a fragment of their time to them." The Project Management Institute's research corroborates this: resource allocation failures – spreading people too thin across too many competing priorities – rank consistently among the leading causes of project underperformance in their annual global surveys. McKinsey, in their research on transformation programmes, has found that insufficient dedication of key talent is one of the most reliable predictors of a transformation that disappoints.

What is interesting about this is not that it happens. It is that we continue to be surprised when it does.

There is an honesty problem at the heart of how organisations staff their most important work. We say that something is a strategic priority – and then we allocate to it in a way that is entirely inconsistent with that claim. We ask people to give their best thinking to an initiative while simultaneously expecting them to keep everything else running. We are, in effect, treating the things we say matter most as though they are a second job.

Nieto-Rodriguez's prescription is unambiguous: high-priority initiatives need fully dedicated teams, assembled at the outset, before anybody has spent months producing deliverables that will need revisiting. Teams whose primary responsibility is the project. Not their main job plus the project. The project.

He has a phrase for the underlying discipline: start less, finish more. It sounds obvious. It turns out to be one of the most politically difficult things in organisational life – because starting things is easy, stopping things is painful, and admitting that you cannot do everything at once requires a clarity about priorities that most organisations find uncomfortable.

The result of not doing it is entirely familiar. Initiatives that limp forward for eighteen months before someone asks, quietly, whether they are still a good idea. Talented people ground down by the cognitive cost of constant context-switching. Projects that could have been excellent, and ended up merely finished.

Or not finished at all.

There is a structural solution to this that not every organisation can implement overnight. But there is also a practical one that is available right now.

The freelance project manager comes with a characteristic that is easy to overlook until you've experienced its consequences: they have one job. Not one job among several. One job. This project, this outcome, this team. They are not managing your initiative in the space between their other responsibilities, because they have no other responsibilities. Their attention is not divided, because there is nothing to divide it with.

This turns out to matter considerably more than it sounds.

Escape Company places project managers who understand that full commitment is not a personality trait. It is a professional condition.

Your most important work deserves it.