At some point in the last decade, a grid became the default artifact of corporate sustainability reporting. You’ve seen it. Issues plotted across two axes (impact on the business, impact on the world), with colored dots showing how material each one is. The dots in the top right get attention. The dots in the bottom left might as well not be there.
The double materiality matrix. In every consequential sustainability report. It signals rigor. It implies that the issues facing the business have been measured, ranked, and understood.
Most of what it implies is wrong.
What the matrix actually does
The materiality matrix borrows its structure from enterprise risk management, which is a thoroughly Planet Simple tool. The assumption is that a complex reality can be cut into components, scored one at a time, and ranked.
Sustainability doesn’t behave that way. Climate change, workforce safety, biodiversity, water use, diversity, governance: these issues interact. A drought doesn’t only affect water use. It affects agricultural inputs, energy availability, community relations, workforce health, and insurance costs. None of that interdependence shows up when you give each issue a dot on a grid.
Then there’s the ranking problem. I’ve worked with companies that placed diversity and inclusion higher on their materiality matrix than workplace health and safety. As an LGBTQ+ person, I care deeply about diversity and inclusion. But is it more important than whether someone goes home at the end of their shift? No manager would actually say so. The matrix says it for them.
The matrix forces choices no manager would make, presents them as the result of rigorous analysis, and locks them into a public document. It creates the illusion of prioritization while obscuring something basic: material issues all have to be managed to the level their nature requires, regardless of their position on a grid.
The illusion of stability
There’s a second problem: time. Even if a materiality assessment captured relative importance accurately the day it was produced, it wouldn’t stay accurate. Conditions move. An issue at moderate materiality today can become critical after a regulatory shift, a supply chain disruption, or a single high-profile incident.
The matrix can’t accommodate any of that. Once published, it sits in the report as a static representation of a dynamic system. And it creates liability. A company that ranked health and safety below diversity and inclusion on its published materiality matrix, and then suffered a serious safety incident, is on the public record saying safety wasn’t its top priority.
What a more honest assessment looks like
Carol Adams, former chair of the body that sets the GRI Standards, wrote in a 2021 GRI paper that the materiality matrix simplifies “the inherent complexity of assessing material sustainability issues, stakeholder engagement, and the societal pursuit of sustainable development.” She’s right.
There’s still good reason to do materiality assessments. Understanding which issues carry the highest strategic weight matters. What changes is the output. Describe materiality in qualitative terms that reflect the actual nature of the issues. Acknowledge the interdependencies. Drop the artificial rankings.
An assessment that says “these issues are all material, here’s how they relate to each other, and here’s how they connect to our strategy” is more honest, and more useful to a decision-maker, than a grid that implies diversity and inclusion is 15 percent more important than health and safety.
The matrix looks like rigor. What it usually does is apply a familiar template to a problem the template was never built to handle.
This is part of the Planet Simple Traps series, exploring the tools and frameworks that look rigorous but quietly reinforce the assumptions holding corporate sustainability back. Based on Leaving Planet Simple by Dr. Alex Gold.