The act of redefining the conditions for victory or completion of a task, either when the original conditions for achieving them were met or whilst the person or group is busy working to achieve the current conditions, in order to prevent them from succeeding. Usually done with
malice by a superior or
peer looking to
exclude or remove people from a group by portraying them as incompetent of not completing the task they keep altering.
When Jake was close to finishing his training, his
supervisor who had always hated him started moving the goalposts by claiming that Jake needed four references of
work experience instead of two in order to graduate, a condition that nobody else had to meet and with only one day left for the
deadline. Jake didn't pass.
