Look closely at the board and you will notice something. Several publishers have written, in plain terms, that the answer may be no, and that they will pay for it anyway. One asks for a go or no-go note. One says outright that an unfavourable conclusion will be acted upon. One retains a completed package on the board specifically because the answer reordered a programme.
This is not modesty. It is arithmetic. A well-evidenced no, delivered in month three, is one of the cheapest things an organisation can buy. The same no, arrived at in month thirty by exhaustion, costs a programme.
A well-evidenced no, delivered in month three, is one of the cheapest things an organisation can buy.
The obstacle is rarely the organisation and usually the incentive. Whoever commissioned the work has, by then, described it internally as promising. A negative result therefore reads as a personal failure rather than as the answer to a question, and the natural response is to commission a further phase. This is how programmes acquire momentum unrelated to evidence.
The countermeasure is procedural and slightly awkward: decide, before the work begins, what result would cause you to stop, and write it down where other people can see it. Publishers on this board do it in the scope. Several go further and say who will receive the result, which removes the option of quietly not circulating it.
There is a corollary for applicants. If a package says it wants an honest answer, believe it, and price the work accordingly. The organisations that write this genuinely mean it, and they remember who told them the truth. The ones who do not mean it are usually detectable from the way the package is written, which is one of several reasons we ask publishers to write them properly.