Work 2035

Work 2035 is a flagship global thought leadership campaign created for multinational software company Citrix. Our pioneering approach combined scenario planning and opinion research to envision and explore four alternative future worlds of work. 

Man Bites Dog harnessed advanced scenario-planning techniques – drawing on the insights of leading experts from academia, think tanks and multinational boards – to develop four alternative visions of work in 2035:

• Freelance Frontiers: A world of augmented workers and distributed organisations.
  
  
• Powered Productives: A world of augmented workers and centralised organisations.
  
  
• Platform Plugins: A world of replaced workers and distributed organisations.
  
  
• Automation Corporations: A world of replaced workers and centralised organisations.

Next, we shared our radical visions with business leaders and knowledge workers across the US and Europe to enable a gap analysis between employer and employee hopes and fears for the future of work. Our data revealed a significant ‘digital disconnect’ between the utopian future of work imagined by business leaders and the dystopian vision of employees. While employers largely imagined a positive future of ‘Powered Productives’, workers foresaw a precarious ‘Platform Plugins’ world. 

Work 2035 was launched as the flagship project for Fieldwork, Citrix’s new thought leadership platform, which was unveiled as part of Citrix’s new brand. 

The campaign was launched globally with a suite of content assets activated across PR, marketing and sales teams. The central asset was an authoritative whitepaper report created by the team at Man Bites Dog, accompanied by a highly visual interactive report and a series of compelling videos and business development presentations to bring these possible future worlds of work to life.

Work 2035 has delivered high engagement levels, with an average read time of almost six minutes for the main landing page and pages related to the campaign receiving over 19,000 views in the weeks after launch. The content has informed bespoke roundtables, helping to develop relationships.

Work 2035 has created a platform for a long-term agenda, which Man Bites Dog has built on with a series of rapid, follow-up thought leadership campaigns. These campaigns have generated more than 450 media articles in key publications across the globe including Harvard Business Review, CNN and Forbes.