Aims astray

The process runs fine but increasingly optimizes a proxy metric instead of the thing you actually want.

The team dashboard is green. Tickets closed per week keeps rising, and everyone gets praised for it. Meanwhile customers quietly churn, because closing a ticket fast and actually solving the problem stopped being the same thing about a year ago. The machine runs beautifully. It is just pointed at the wrong thing.

Aims astray is the cue that a process increasingly optimizes a proxy, a stand-in measure, instead of the outcome you care about. The engine: measured success attracts rewards and resources, which produce more metric-seeking behavior, which produces more measured success. To check it, put the proxy and the real outcome side by side over time; diverging lines are the tell. Then trace where rewards actually flow. Finally, rule out the rival: sometimes a metric was simply defined wrong once, a one-time error with no self-feeding behavior around it. When the cue confirms, you stop celebrating the number and start questioning the scoreboard itself. Don't reach for this label while performance and outcome still track each other; tearing up a working metric on suspicion alone creates its own damage.