The Amadeus Way

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How we helped Amadeus
find the way

The Amadeus Way

Amadeus is a highly successful and growing travel tech business. They’ve just celebrated their 30th birthday and are stuffed full of very smart people doing very smart things. A key to their success is their constant evolution – with every evolution comes a collective effort to reshape the culture and bring their people on the journey with them. The current step is to make a collective shift in mindset, bringing everyone together to work in one, global Amadeus way.

Our clients were clear: they didn’t want a campaign. Having already done the hard yards to define their new way of being, it wasn’t the time for hooks and straplines. Rather, it was about building a platform for sustainable communication, sharing how things had shifted and bringing people together in new ways. It was about grounding a new way of working in everyday action – The Amadeus Way.

Starting the drumbeat

Amadeus wanted to tear up the rule book. They believed the traditional hierarchy of ‘vision-strategy-values-behaviours’ wouldn’t drive the right kind of change. Instead, they developed six simple questions. If their people could answer the questions positively, then they knew they were doing the right thing. It was brilliantly simple.

And so were our objectives: build awareness, make the questions an everyday habit, start the drumbeat of change in an accessible, people-led way. We needed to start a movement, while communicating in a way that was grass-roots, simple and clever. On the surface, a simple brief. But simple is never easy…

How we built a movement

With offices in 120 countries, we had to reach 16,000 people who shared 146 nationalities and spoke 62 languages. While simplicity was our watch-word, there was still a lot of complex planning to do!

We worked with Amadeus to refine the questions and accompanying manifesto. They had to carry a lot of weight, but they had to be clear, human and easily actionable. We refined, tested and edited to make sure every word did what it needed to, and made sense for everyone. The key was to make sure the questions resonated. We wanted people to really own them: this isn’t corporate blurb, this is relevant for every team and individual no matter where you sit in the organisation.

We created a programme of activities and collateral, including a 6-month series of interactive mini-workshops which focused on each question in turn, our aim was to get people talking, collaborating and thinking differently about how to do things at Amadeus.

We knew line managers were a vital audience, so we developed a managers’ guide, helping them lead their people through the changes for the long-term.

We also created a set of digital nudges, which would keep the questions at the top of the audience’s mind. We went old-school too, creating a beautiful journal. The journals contained the behaviour framework questions, the manifesto, interesting quotes and a flowchart that moved through each question. Surprising and thought-provoking situational graphics kept things fresh around the office, aiming to spark even more conversations.

We’ve only just launched this work at Amadeus. We can’t wait to see how it grows over the years to come and how behaviour change develops throughout the organisation. Even though we’re at the beginning of this journey, we can already see The Amadeus Way questions coming up spontaneously in conversation.

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Kate Lines

Client Services Director

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Hattie Roche

Co-Managing Director and Strategy Chief

+44 [0] 7850 491 827

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Carol Whitworth

Founder / Inspiration & Innovation Director

+44 [0] 7710 163 499

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