An amount of time devoted to operating in the blue plane.
Alternative names: Surprise budget, Error budget.
As long as an organization is in the Pursuit of Better, Faster, Cheaper, activities in the Blue Plane are forever being deprioritized unless they are part of Tempo Interruptions blocking the delivery of the next feature.
Some amount of tempo interruption occurs just trying to be better, faster, and cheaper. See Alignment
Depending on the type of work being done, teams may find those to be minimal.
A sustained tempo is great for organizations, but it is fleeting.
One proposal for helping teams increase their likelihood of sustained long term progress is to budget a percentage of their time to be spent in the blue plain.
If pursing better, faster, cheaper does not exhaust that budget, then the team should spend it anyway.
If it is regularly spent in pursuit of optimality, the team needs to be allocated more blue budget or they will hit a large tempo interruption which will greatly slow forward progress before long.