The Duolingo Effect.

The other day, I read an article about habit-forming apps. The obvious explanation is that they work because they make things automatic — no thinking required. But research from Clemson University says otherwise. It found that people stay motivated by the challenge of protecting their streak, not by how easy the habit feels. A flight with no Wi-Fi, a dead phone battery, a chaotic day — solving that becomes its own reward.

A streak isn't just a number sitting on top of a habit. It's a second goal stacked on the first one, and that second goal — the one about not breaking the chain — ends up doing most of the motivational work.

I kept turning that over, because it's basically the argument we've been making to partners at Greener Act for a while now. We just didn't have the language for it.

A report once a year. A pledge signed at a kickoff event. A slide in the annual deck nobody opens again until the next audit comes around. Real budget, good intentions, and almost nothing moves in the twelve months in between.

For us, sustainability is not something that needs doing every few months. For it to actually become something — a real practice rather than a slide — it has to be done consistently. The same way a language sticks. In the same way any habit becomes second nature through consistent repetition, until skipping it feels stranger than showing up for it.

What we actually build

Every person on the Greener Act app gets a Greener Profile — a running account of their own Greener Journey, including how much they've offset along the way. Structurally, it does the same job as a streak counter: it gives someone a number that only moves when they move it.

On the partner side, the Hub doesn't hand companies a static report. Goals come with real deadlines and real-time progress updates, not at the end of a quarter. The data backs up why that matters: across the Hub, the feature people return to most isn't the export button — it's the visualization. It lets you watch your own behavioural pattern take shape, week over week.

Less reporting, more showing up

None of this turns sustainability into a game with no stakes. It only finally matches the format to the behaviour being asked for. No amount of compliance language has ever made someone open an app twice.

That's the actual shift underway in corporate sustainability right now. If habit-forming apps are the best behaviour-change technology we've built in the last decade, sustainability is overdue to borrow the playbook.

We create habits by introducing competitiveness. Competition keeps people engaged until it forms a habit — and it's worth seeing what it looks like inside your own organisation.