Surrogation

A metric an organization tracks is not the same as the outcome the metric was meant to summarize. The first is what the dashboard shows. The second is what the organization actually wanted. Surrogation is the slow substitution of one for the other, until people are serving the proxy and have forgotten the goal.

Wells Fargo's cross-selling scandal is the textbook case. The bank measured products per customer and built its culture around an eight-product target, captured in the slogan "Eight is Great." The real goal was customer relationships. The number was a proxy for it. Under relentless pressure to hit the number, employees opened around two million accounts customers had never authorized. The metric climbed. The thing it was supposed to represent collapsed.

No one set out to defraud customers as a strategy. They set out to hit a target that pay, ranking, and continued employment depended on. The proxy had become the job. Once a number carries that much weight, people optimize the number directly, by whatever path is shortest, and the path that produces real customer relationships is rarely the shortest. The proxy and the outcome came apart, and the organization kept rewarding the proxy.

That is the mechanism. A measure is useful exactly because it stands in for something harder to see. But the moment the measure becomes the goal, the link between them is up for grabs, and pressure will find the gap. The number stays green because the number is what everyone is feeding. The outcome it once tracked is no longer attached to it.

AI deepens this, because optimization is what these systems do. Point a model at a proxy, a click, a watch-time second, an engagement score, and it will pursue that proxy with a thoroughness no sales floor could match, including down every path you did not intend. Surrogation stops being a cultural drift and becomes an engineered outcome. If the metric is not the thing you actually want, a system built to maximize it will eventually show you the difference.