Glossary
Surrogation
What is surrogation?
Surrogation occurs when a measure takes the place of the goal it was supposed to represent. The score becomes the point.
Example
A business wants happier customers and uses survey scores to track progress. It could start pushing for better ratings while neglecting parts of the service the survey misses. Higher scores would then be treated as a better experience, whether or not customers actually received one.
What the research found
Choi, Hecht, and Tayler studied surrogation in strategic performance measurement. Two experiments found that incentive compensation could increase the tendency to treat an imperfect measure as the strategy itself, especially when compensation depended on a single measure rather than multiple measures.
Why it matters
Measures help us judge progress. They can also pull attention away from what matters. Check whether the measure still represents the goal, and whether improving the score improves the thing you care about.
Multiple measures reduced the relative problem under the experimental conditions. Simply adding more numbers to a dashboard is not a guaranteed fix.