Walk through almost any large organization today and count what people are actually doing. Some are keeping the lights on, running the processes that hold the present in place. But more and more of them are somewhere else entirely, heads down on something that does not exist yet. A new system. A new market. A merger, a migration, an AI model, a model of care that has never been tried here before. They are not running the present. They are building the future. And there are now more of them than there are of almost anyone else.
The previous article made an argument: that organizations have become project-driven while the way we develop leaders has stayed operation-driven, and that the two have quietly come apart. An argument like that deserves to be proven, not simply asserted. So here is the proof, and it is hiding in plain sight inside your own workforce.
Begin with the headcount, because it is startling. There are now close to forty million project professionals at work around the world. Hold that number against two of the largest, most familiar professions on the planet. There are roughly twenty-five million software developers. There are around thirty million nurses. The people whose whole job is to deliver change have quietly grown more numerous than the developers who write the world's software, and they stand shoulder to shoulder with the nurses who keep it well. This is no longer a profession at the edge of the org chart. It has become one of the largest things human beings do for a living.
Now make it concrete, because the clearest proof is the one you already recognize. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez has made a simple observation that stays with everyone who hears it. A major bank, he notes, now employs more software engineers than bankers. Sit with what that means. Walk the floors of a large bank today and you will find vast teams in technology, product, data, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and transformation. Not one of them is running the banking operation of last year. Every one of them is building the bank of next year. The sign on the building still says bank. The work inside it has become the work of a technology, product, risk, and transformation organization that happens to hold a banking licence.
And the bank is not the exception. It is the template. Look across any industry and the same pattern appears. Retailers are rebuilding themselves around digital commerce and supply-chain modernization. Hospitals are standing up new models of care and the data platforms beneath them. Manufacturers are wiring their factories for automation and sustainability. Insurers, telecoms, and governments are deep in regulatory modernization, customer experience redesign, and AI adoption. None of this is the steady state. All of it is future-state work, and it is no longer a single programme that begins and ends. It is continuous. Organizations are building the future the way they once ran the present, all the time, as the main event rather than the side project.
So who is doing all this building? It is tempting to picture forty million project managers, lanyards and Gantt charts, sitting in a project office somewhere. That picture is wrong, and the people who study this say so directly. The real changemaker, in their words, is anyone who delivers change, whatever title sits on the door. As the head of the profession's global body, Pierre Le Manh , puts it, change only happens through successful projects. And the research bears the scale out. PMI's own work, under his leadership, points to demand for up to thirty million more of these professionals within the next decade, and the World Economic Forum, from an entirely different vantage point, names project leadership among the roles pulling employment growth forward through the end of the decade. The work of building the future has not stayed politely inside the project office. It has walked out and spread across the entire enterprise.
The newest and fastest moving of this work makes the point sharper still. So much of the future is now being built with artificial intelligence that leading AI initiatives has become a discipline of its own, captured in the Cognitive Project Management for AI approach co-created by Kathleen Walch. The people doing it are rarely called project managers. They are data scientists, clinicians, product owners, and operators, all of them delivering change under conditions no operational playbook anticipated.
And this is the moment the story turns uncomfortable. If the building of the future is now happening everywhere, in every function, led by people of every title, then the ability to lead that work can no longer belong to one role. And yet that is exactly how most organizations still treat it. They lock the discipline of delivery inside a single function. Even the office built to hold that discipline, the PMO, is only now being redefined from a control function into a genuine value enabler, the work Americo Pinto and the PMO Global Alliance at PMI have done so much to advance. Meanwhile organizations groom their most senior people for operational command, the way it has always been done, and then are genuinely surprised when a well-funded transformation drifts and stalls under executives who were never prepared to lead one. The workforce has reorganized itself around building the future. The leadership model has stayed exactly where it was.
Which leaves only one honest conclusion. A capability the whole organization now leans on, practised by leaders in every discipline, cannot be left as a narrow technical skill owned by a few specialists. It has to be grown as a leadership capability in its own right, one that belongs to no single role and is built at the level where the real portfolio of bets is owned. That is a very different thing from hiring more project managers. It is the thing this series is steadily working toward.
Proving the shift is real, though, only sharpens the next question. It is one thing to show that more people than ever are building the future. It is another to ask whether the leadership we inherited can actually carry the weight of how complex that building has become. The honest answer is not comforting, and it is where this story goes next.
So a question worth sitting with, and worth answering in the comments. In your industry, are more people running the present or building the future?
If these questions are live in your organisation, the conversation is worth having. You can book a complimentary strategy conversation with Samia.
Samia N. Waqar is the Founder of S&S Coaching Consulting Services and the creator of the Role Agnostic Project Leadership programme, a 50-hour executive development experience designed for C-suite and senior leaders. She is a PMI Authorized Instructor and holds nine globally recognised credentials spanning the full capability framework she teaches. Connect with Samia at snsccs.com or on LinkedIn.
Sources
Nieto-Rodriguez, A. (2021) 'The Project Economy Has Arrived', Harvard Business Review, November–December 2021. Available at: https://hbr.org/2021/11/the-project-economy-has-arrived
Project Management Institute (2021) Talent Gap: Ten-Year Employment Trends, Costs, and Global Implications. Available at: https://www.pmi.org/learning/careers/talent-gap-2021
Project Management Institute (2025) Global Project Management Talent Gap. Available at: https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/global-project-management-talent-gap
World Economic Forum (2025) The Future of Jobs Report 2025. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025