The gap between what people intend to do and what they actually do represents one of the most significant challenges in behavioural change. Understanding and addressing this intention-action gap is crucial for organisations seeking to drive meaningful impact.
Understanding the Gap
Research shows that while 65% of employees express commitment to organisational changes, only 25% consistently follow through with new behaviors. This disconnect stems from various psychological and environmental factors that create resistance between intention and action.
Common Barriers
Several key barriers prevent intentions from becoming actions:
Individuals can face an overload of information, and competing priorities, leading to cognitive overload. Often in the workplace, employees are fairly “full” with tasks already, meaning they simply don’t have the capacity or energy to initiate or carry through a process of change.
Sometimes, there can be external barriers to implementing change too. For example, unclear instructions and communications about what actually needs to happen is a simple, but alarmingly common, misgiving. Similarly, when things are made too complex, or when technical barriers exist to change, the friction can often be sufficient to create a barrier to change.
We grossly underestimate the power of our social relationships and group behaviour. Peer influence can often decide between change and resistance. The most effective change programmes I’ve been involved with have each had a very careful consideration for how the change should cascade. This careful planning does so much of the heavy lifting it really beggars belief that it is so often missed. Multiple contextual factors can play a part in preventing change, be it fear of judgment (i.e., an psychologically unsafe environment) or simply deeply rooted cultural norms which run counter to the desired course of action. But there are few, if any, socially-rooted reasons for the intention-action gap which can’t be overcome… so all is by all means not lost!
Bridge-Building Strategies
Some of the more effective strategies we’ve seen which close the gap include drilling down into implementation realities, identifying where new behaviours might fit into existing behaviours, and leveraging the physical and social environment to make change easy…
We’ve seen that specific action planning can really help. Sure, it can feel pedantic while planning it, but it can really help because behaviour change is hard and susceptible to many influences. Using if-then and even-if scenarios also really help to root any intended change into reality. I remember hearing about the “even-if” test, and being awestruck for its simplicity. It grounds the change into reality and enforces you to consider the costs (financial and non-financial) you’d be willing to incur in order to carry through with the change.
Habit stacking is just one of the ways of seeing how new behaviours can incorporate into the existing behavioural picture. We also want to see if there are routines that are followed and/or any smaller behaviours which can become a catalyst for the real behaviour change sought.
Recognising the influence of our physical and social environment, we can identify ways to make change easy, attractive, normative, and, being frank, something we barely even need to think about. We can leverage the latent power of defaults, use innovative triggers to outsource our memory storage, and make everything in the environment supportive of the desired behaviours, while adding friction to undesired behaviours.
Measuring Success
Measurement is a key part of the transformation process. Such things we might want to capture might include the behaviour completion rates, time-to-action metrics, the sustainability of change, and wider impact indicators (i.e., the impact of the action). This needn’t be complex or costly. In fact, it’s preferable if it’s neither, so as to easily integrate into the evaluation and improvement cycle.
Ultimately, the key to bridging the intention-action gap lies in thinking through the wider ecosystem in which change needs to occur. One which makes the desired behaviours easier, more attractive, and more naturally integrated into existing routines. Success comes not from willpower alone, but from thoughtful design of the physical and social environment.