When MMRV Becomes the Mission, Everyone Loses
There’s nothing inherently wrong with box-checking. Standards, audits, protocols, and data templates exist for good reasons: comparability, accountability, and basic assurance. They keep organizations in the game and create alignment amongst stakeholders.
But somewhere along the way, the environmental world made a quiet but consequential mistake:
We turned MMRV (measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification) into the purpose of the system, instead of the byproduct of a functioning one.
As a result, two bubbles of data have emerged. MMRV bubble: data generated for paperwork, markets, and claims. Decision bubble: data that actually affects operations, resilience, and financial outcomes. The problem is that these bubbles barely touch.
It took launching—and ultimately leaving—a voluntary carbon market called Nori to understand this distinction firsthand. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure to consult across multiple agricultural supply chains designing MMRV systems. That experience taught me how easily systems drift toward reporting theater instead of operational insight. And increasingly, I work with leaders who are tired of measuring nonsense and ready to actually change their supply chains.
The Status Quo Feels Safe, and Deadens Innovation
Most sustainability teams don’t cling to MMRV because they love it. They cling because the status quo feels safe and they need it to report or access a market. Numbers in a bubble feel defensible. And this isn’t anecdotal: industry benchmarking from a 2025 report shows that most sustainability data systems today remain fragmented, compliance-oriented, and weakly connected to real operations.
Last year’s spreadsheet feels safe.
The soil sampling protocol feels safe.
The auditor-approved lookup value feels safe.
Doing what worked last year feels safe.
But safety isn’t the same as strategy. And it definitely isn’t impact.
I see this across scope 3 programs, voluntary carbon offsets, and statutory markets. Companies generate enormous volumes of data that clear an audit or secure a fuel pathway, but do nothing to improve resilience, risk, or ROI. Last month, a market leader put it bluntly to me: “I just need defensibility.” When defensibility becomes the requirement, improvement becomes optional.
Uncertainty barely moves.
Farmer decisions stay the same.
The supply chain learns nothing about where resilience or emissions reductions are actually possible.
That’s the distortion caused when MMRV becomes the reason the system exists, rather than evidence generated by a system that’s already working.
Compliance keeps you in the game.
It doesn’t keep you in business.
What if the Data Worked for Farmers Too?
Imagine a world where the data collected for market access actually mattered to the people producing it. Where the numbers that reduce uncertainty for a trader or procurement team also reduce uncertainty for a farmer making decisions under risk. Where the information flowing up the supply chain flowed back down with equal value.
In that world, the whole question of collecting primary data to check a box wouldn’t feel like compliance at all—it would feel like support.
Right now, the system feels backwards.
The supply chain extracts data from farmers to satisfy MMRV requirements, and while farmers often receive value (e.g., market access, cost-share payments, premium opportunities), the information itself rarely helps them make better decisions. Soil samples, practice logs, digital forms, drone imagery, these all serve a reporting function, not a learning function. They don’t help a farmer decide when to irrigate, how to rotate, where input costs are rising, or where resilience is actually improving.
That’s what MMRV was supposed to enable: measurable, accountable, progressive improvement. Reporting was meant to follow outcomes, not replace them.
If the data a company needed to report were the same data that helped a farmer improve decisions, adoption wouldn’t be a behavioral problem. MMRV wouldn’t require compliance campaigns. And the supply chain wouldn’t need to incentivize participation. It would just work, and support people getting from here to there.
This is the real opportunity: when data creation aligns with data value for both the buyer and the farmer, MMRV becomes effortless. When it doesn’t, it becomes extraction.
Outcomes-First Leadership Asks a Different Question
The organizations that break out of this cycle don’t start with “What data do we need to report?”
They start with:
“What outcomes are we actually trying to create?”
Then
“What matters enough to change?”
This is where the shift happens.
It’s important to acknowledge: this isn’t a critique of MMRV itself.
Much of today’s infrastructure stands on the shoulders of thoughtful, outcomes-driven initiatives. Programs like the Cool Soil Initiative are built on improving agronomic resilience and soil health, with carbon as a by-product. Their purpose is to help farmers and supply-chain partners understand risk, productivity, and stewardship through better data.
When leaders look beyond carbon accounting to actual operational behavior, resilience, and farmer ROI, an entirely different system takes shape:
- Data isn’t collected to satisfy an audit; it’s collected because it predicts or explains outcomes
- Measurement is tied to real dynamics: water, yields, input costs, risks, soil function
- Farmers participate because the information helps them, and they have the support they need, not because someone needs their fields to hit a reporting quota
- Companies discover where interventions actually move their supply shed, not where a model says they should.
In those systems, MMRV isn’t the product. MMRV is the exhaust.
MMRV is what naturally emerges from understanding the system well enough to improve it.
Why the Current Model Fails Leaders
Here’s the truth sustainability VPs won’t say out loud, but almost all of them feel:
MMRV-driven systems trap them.
They’re responsible for showing progress, but they work within frameworks that reward documentation over change.
They spend their time meeting procedural requirements instead of operational goals.
They’re afraid to deviate from the rules because it might invalidate their ability to claim credit.
And deep down they know that their numbers aren’t telling the whole story.
The bottleneck isn’t leadership.
It’s the architecture.
It’s a system optimized for reporting, not improvement.
A Better System Starts With Better Questions
If the environmental world flipped its logic, if we treated MMRV as the byproduct of real outcomes, we’d ask new questions:
- What do farmers need to make better decisions?
- What explains variation in outcomes across the supply shed?
- What data is actually predictive of change?
- Where do we reduce risk, not just emissions?
- What patterns “unlock” value beyond carbon?
Those questions drive learning.
They drive change.
They drive supply chain transformation.
And once the system is working?
Reporting writes itself.
What Changes When We Stop Optimizing for Paperwork
If we rebuilt environmental programs around outcomes, not audits, we’d see a different landscape:
- Resilient supply chains grounded in reality, not assumptions
- Real emissions reductions based on interventions that work
- Farmer-aligned incentives that make sense for adoption
- Lower risk because companies understand how their supply system behaves
- Better rules shaped by evidence, not convenience
When outcomes drive the system, MMRV becomes faster, cheaper, more accurate, and frankly, more meaningful.
Leaders stop gaming the spreadsheets and start shaping the markets.
The Question That Starts It All
There’s one question we see powerful leaders asking. It separates the box-tickers from the system-builders:
Are we measuring what actually matters?
Ask that question honestly, and the entire architecture reveals itself.
You stop accepting bad assumptions.
You stop mistaking activity for progress.
You stop designing programs for auditors instead of operators.
You start building supply chains that actually improve.
Compliance keeps you in the game.
Outcomes keep you in business.
And MMRV should be the reflection of a system that works, not the flimsy scaffolding holding it together.
If you’re tired of measuring the wrong things and ready to build a system that works, use this form to tell me where you’re stuck. Let’s see if we can build something better.