Surrogation

Surrogation happens when a decision-maker starts managing a measure as though it were the objective behind that measure. A score, count, or dashboard indicator can be useful without capturing everything the organization actually wants. Trouble begins when improving the number is accepted as proof that the underlying goal improved too.

A green dashboard and an unresolved problem

Imagine a campus maintenance team responsible for keeping buildings safe and reliable. Its weekly dashboard emphasizes the number of inspection tickets closed. Supervisors begin assigning more staff to small jobs that can be finished quickly, while a recurring ventilation fault stays open because diagnosing it will take several days.

At the next review, the closure count is up. The dashboard is green. The team treats those results as evidence that maintenance reliability has improved, even though the persistent fault remains.

This is a hypothetical scenario, not a reported case. It illustrates the switch: closed tickets were meant to provide information about reliable maintenance. Once the ticket count becomes the verdict on reliability, the proxy has displaced the objective.

What surrogation means

The accounting researchers who developed this line of research use strategic construct for an objective such as service quality, innovation, or reliability. Because an abstract objective cannot always be observed directly, an organization selects performance measures that represent parts of it.

Surrogation occurs when decision-makers treat one of those measures as though it fully embodies the strategic construct. The measure may still contain valuable information. The error lies in forgetting the gap between what is easy to count and what the organization ultimately cares about. The foundational experiments by Choi, Hecht, and Tayler examine this substitution in strategic performance measurement and decision-making (2013 study).

That makes surrogation different from ordinary measurement error. Measurement error concerns how accurately a measure records something. Surrogation concerns how a person uses the measure in judgment. A noisy measure does not automatically produce surrogation, and an accurately recorded measure can still be treated as if it tells the whole story.

Why a proxy can take over

Measures are concrete. They can be displayed, compared, rewarded, and discussed in a meeting. Strategic objectives are often broader and harder to evaluate. Controlled experiments suggest that this difference in accessibility can invite a cognitive shortcut: the available measure supplies an easier answer than the underlying objective.

Incentives can strengthen that pull. Choi, Hecht, and Tayler found more surrogation when compensation depended on a single measure and less when compensation incorporated multiple measures of the same strategic construct (2012 study). But rewards are not required. Black and colleagues found surrogation in experimental settings without incentive compensation, showing that the presence of a measure alone can influence judgment (2022 study).

These studies identify conditions that can produce the pattern; they do not show that every metric will replace its objective or that every organization responds in the same way.

When the mismatch matters

When a measure only partly represents the objective, a decision that improves the measure may leave the objective unchanged or move it in the wrong direction. An organization can then direct attention, staff time, or rewards toward what the dashboard recognizes while overlooking important results outside it.

The consequence is conditional. If a measure tracks the objective closely, operational focus on that measure may be useful. Exploratory field research by Reinking, Arnold, and Sutton found that some executives intentionally used dashboards to focus operational managers on measures they believed were aligned with strategy (2020 field study). That finding does not establish that surrogation generally improves performance. It does show why the quality of the link between measure and objective matters more than the mere existence of a metric.

Common misunderstandings

Surrogation means someone is gaming a target. Deliberate gaming can produce a similar surface result, but it is not required. A person can sincerely accept the metric as a complete account of performance.

A bad result proves that the metric is useless. A partial measure can still be informative. The practical question is whether decision-makers remember what it captures, what it omits, and how firmly it is connected to the intended outcome.

One better metric will solve the problem. No measure becomes complete merely because it is new. Several measures can provide a wider view, but they still need to be tested against the construct they are intended to represent.