The intention-action gap: the collaborative economy businesses seeking to change behaviours
You might have heard of the intention-action gap?
In essence, it is the reason diets are constantly falling by the wayside, grades are not being met, and your brand new running shoes remain pristine…The intention-action gap describes that chasm that emerges between what our ideal selves look like, and how we actually spend our time. And it is big business. Collaborative economy start-ups have flocked to this space as the promise of reducing this gap has so much potential both in terms of revenue as well as impact on the world. We are fascinated by behaviour change and habits, and how technological interventions could make bridging the intention-action gap easier. Very often, the proposed solution is a type of Online Community, where users seek the support they need to bridge that gap. These Communities can be anything from advice-giving communities, to websites that deliver financially punitive measures when you fail to meet your goal, to online spaces that allow you to publicly pledge your objectives.
But it isn’t a sector full of success stories. I wrote a similar summary two years ago detailing the landscape in 2014. When I revisited that post, I realised that 2/3 of the companies I had profiled in that post have now shut down.
So what have we learned in those last two years? And what new solutions are gaining traction in 2016?
Behaviour is HARD to change
It’s not like we didn’t know this before, but the market was full of optimism and ideas to test. Study Pact is one of those clever interventions which seems to have faded out. It’s intention was to ‘crowdsource motivation’ through tying your money to your objective; if you didn’t meet it, you lost your money. If you did, you were allocated money from the other users who hadn’t fulfilled their goal.
It’s a smart model, leveraging a well-tested incentive (money), combined with the power of the crowd (peer accountability) and the opportunity to ‘win’ (gamification). However, as with many of these services, due to legal restrictions, the user is still in control of their participation. Ironically, the intention-action gap returns when making purchase choices, affecting products like these; “why should I spend money to study?”, you might ask yourself, “tomorrow I will definitely do 5 hours!”.
It would be unfair to suggest that crowdsourcing solutions to plug the intention-action gap have all failed. There are some excellent platforms out there which have now got significant data which prove their effectiveness. One example being DoNation (www.wearedonation.com). On their website, they quote statistics of around 54% success rate for pledges made over 2 months, and 42% who keep their pledge for a year or more. Another example is MyFitnessPal, which has an incredibly active online community; a feature which clearly keeps many users motivated.
The future of fighting the gap
So what should we expect to see in terms of innovations trying to fight the intention-action gap in 2016 and going forward? And how many of those will be collaborative economy businesses?
The observation I have made is that we are moving towards more premium or bespoke solutions (using a platform to pair people with expert ‘coaches’ or ‘trainers’) as opposed to the general crowd-support concept which was more commonly used in 2014. Good examples of companies which are embracing this are Rise, the app which matches nutritionists with people looking to eat healthier, and GoodGym, the organisation which partners runners with elderly ‘coaches’ who require a visit once a week.
Another shift which we have not yet fully made, but I can see the beginnings of, is towards a bot-powered coaching and accountability model. This is a very interesting concept, but with many facets to consider, not least because it potentially removes the need for humans to be paired with others for support. We are already seeing bots that are able to coach customer service workers in real-time to improve the service they are providing. What kind of applications could that integrated technology have on individuals trying to change their behaviours? For the moment, many more interventions will be needed to understand how we react to bots and if they have less or more impact on helping us reduce the intention-action gap.
So for the moment we can continue relying on good old-fashioned will power and habit creation, layering our own incentives (FitBit or MyFitnessPal tracking, accountability groups etc) as we go. But let’s see what the future holds; the intention-action gap exploration has only really just begun.
