Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Costly moment
A situation in which a stated value and the pressure of the moment point in different directions, and people are watching the decision. Culture is set in these moments. A value that holds only when it costs nothing is decoration.
Where the standard develops it
- CC-5Values, integrity, and ethical judgment under pressureWhat you do when the right call is the costly one.
- CC-1Psychological safety and productive conflictSafe to speak, expected to disagree, committed once decided.
Related terms
- Accountability without fear
- Clear ownership and honest consequences for patterns of unaccountability, combined with real safety for honest error.
- Blameless postmortem
- An incident review that asks how the system allowed the failure and what to change, rather than who to blame.
- Brilliant jerk
- A high performer whose behaviour breaches the team's values.
- Culture
- The accumulated pattern of what behaviour gets rewarded, tolerated and punished in practice.
- Error budget
- The tolerable shortfall against a service-level objective, treated as a resource to spend that gates risk-taking.
- Learning zone
- The combination of high psychological safety and high standards.
- Psychological safety
- A shared belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as admitting error, asking questions and challenging.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Costly moment. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.costly-moment). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/costly-moment