LIVE WEBINAR | NOVEMBER 5 | 12 PM ET
Fund the experiment, not the plan.
Most portfolio reviews have one: a program that stays green month after month while the people closest to it stop believing it will ever deliver. They're usually right. The program keeps its funding because nobody wrote down, before the money moved, the result that would end it. Annual planning makes this worse: it commits a year of budget before any evidence exists and schedules no meeting to check progress toward outcomes.
Join The Select Group and Planisware on November 5, 2026 for a one-hour discussion on funding work in smaller rounds, each tied to a claim you can test and a date when someone reviews the evidence.
THE PROBLEM
Annual planning is broken
Most organizations put a lot of work into the annual plan. Then the year starts, and nobody reads the plan again until the next one.
Priorities move during the year. The funding usually doesn't.
Investment decisions stay fixed long after the assumptions behind them have changed, and every month of spend makes the original decision harder to question (the sunk cost fallacy).
Stopping starts to read as a verdict on the sponsor instead of a decision about the work, which makes raising it a personal act, and most choose to let it slide. (Anyone who has sat through that portfolio review knows how quiet the room gets.)
THE NEW OPERATING MODEL
A new approach to strategic portfolio management
The organizations that handle this well treat funding as a series of decisions instead of one decision made in January.
Before the money moves, they:
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Write down the claim each bet is meant to prove
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Name the result that would end it, as a state and a date
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Run the cheapest real test that can produce evidence
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Read evidence against that result at scheduled gates, and fund the next round only on what the last one learned
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Treat Stop as a normal gate outcome, alongside Go, Pivot and Retest
Strategy changes during the year. Funding decisions should be able to change with it
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What you'll learn
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Build a portfolio around strategic experiments instead of fixed initiatives, each with a written condition that would end it
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Fund work in rounds, so the next dollar depends on what the last one learned
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Add one line to every portfolio review: what have we learned about the original claim since last time?
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Use scenario planning and AI-assisted analysis to compare options at each gate
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Tie each investment to an outcome your CFO already tracks
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Move the PMO from tracking status to reading evidence
Meet the hosts
Adam Mattis
Head of Product and Alliances, The Select Group
Adam covers why funded programs keep running long after the evidence turns against them, and how writing down the result that would stop a bet, before the money moves, turns stopping into a scheduled decision instead of a personal admission.
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