Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-11
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Christophe Midler, Emeritus CNRS Research Director, École Polytechnique
In a few decades, project-based work has spread across all fields of collective action, from businesses to administrations. This “projectification” of society, a powerful lever of innovation and adaptability, has redefined forms of work, organizational structures, and modes of public decision-making. But this “silent revolution” also reveals new vulnerabilities, where the quest for agility comes at the cost of instability and new tensions.
The project mode as a form of work coordination has never been as present as it is now. It is indeed very common nowadays to hear about agile projects implementing generative artificial intelligence. These concretize promises or ecosystem projects to mobilize coalitions of public and private actors. They thus implement the major contemporary transitions called for by climate change, such as green reindustrialization.
The project is a pillar of the growth model through innovation, awarded this year by the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel;Philippe Aghionis the laureate. However, the rise of the project as a major form of coordination in companies, as well as in administrations, dates back half a century now.
Without noise or slogans, a profound transformation has reshaped the organization of work and the conduct of collective action: the project has established itself as the driver of innovation and change. This movement, termed “projectification” by Christophe Midler as early as 1995, has since unfolded in a discreet yet irreversible manner.
It’s that welet’s analyze in an articlefor the 50 years of theFrench Management Review.
Project Management
Born from the major military programs of the Cold War, project management originally relied on planning and control: defining a goal, breaking it down into tasks, monitoring deadlines and costs. This model, stemming fromAmerican scientific management, entered into crisis in the 1980s, unable to manage the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the environments.
Now, at the same time, theJapanese automobile industryrenews project management methods by showing that efficiency and creativity can be combined through strengthening project teams, cooperation between trades, and collective problem-solving.
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Under the impetus of French and Scandinavian researchers, the project then ceased to be a simple execution tool to become a mode of organization in its own right, centered on learning, experimentation, and collective engagement.
From industry to the State
In industry, it takes shape in the “project teams,” where engineers, designers, and suppliers work together to shorten development cycles. It will soon be at the epicenter of a deeper and broader transformation of corporate engineering: the development of concurrent engineering, which disrupts the involvement of the various professions engaged in product development processes. It will even help transform the relationship between companies, with the deployment of co-development and co-innovation.
Little by little, this logic is spreading to other areas: research, culture, urban planning, health, education, digital technology. The State itself adopts experimental, temporary, and collaborative devices to manage its public policies.
This shift has disrupted the traditional hierarchy between jobs (the company’s permanent structures) and projects (temporary actions). The latter become the place where skills, careers, and sometimes the strategies of companies are developed. In a world of intensive innovation, it no longer simply executes the strategy: it helps to create it.
Exploration projects, for example in the space or automotive industry with autonomous vehicles, for instance, allow learning by doing, testing uses, and bringing together industrial partners and clients around shifting objectives.
Instability, overload, and uncertainty
This organization of work in project mode is not without drawbacks. Praised for its flexibility, it also generates instability, overload, and professional uncertainty. Teams form and dissolve according to deadlines; performance is measured by the deliverable rather than by duration. This invisible intensification of work particularly affects engineers, researchers, and managers, who are often forced to chain projects as “missions,” without this being properly valued in their career.
The project now appears as the new instrument of governing change. It embodies the ability to articulate flexibility and vision, local initiative and collective framework. For example,the Chinese experience of the electric vehicleillustrates how a public power can orchestrate these dynamics: by setting a long-term vision, supporting experimentation, and selecting the most effective initiatives – an “administered Darwinism” in the service of industrial transition.
Beyond the cost-time-quality trio, it has become necessary to integrate environmental, social, and collective learning dimensions. And this is not without raising debates regarding its articulation with our Western democratic collective action models.
Fifty years after the emergence of the concept, projectification has profoundly transformed our companies, our administrations, and our ways of working. It is no longer just a management technique: it is a grammar of change, both a promise of agility and a source of new tensions. A decisive revolution that shapes the economy of tomorrow.
The authors do not work for, advise, own shares in, receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and have declared no other affiliations than their research institution.
–ref. The silent revolution of project-based work –https://theconversation.com/the-silent-revolution-of-project-based-work-281449