Page 16 - Food and Drink Business Magazine May 2019

EVENT | WOMEN IN PACKAGING
Creative collaboration for the workplace of tomorrow
Creativity, collaboration and a rapidly changing workplace were some of the key points addressed by BrandOpus Australia managing director Nikki Moeschinger, the keynote speaker at the 2019 Women in Packaging Breakfast Forum. Doris Prodanovic reports.
ABOVE: Nikki Moeschinger urged attendees at the breakfast to be bold and have a go. To not value efficiencies over effectiveness.
SPEAKING to more than 100 attendees at the Women in Packaging Breakfast in Sydney on 30 April, Nikki Moeschinger led her presentation – entitled Creativity, Spirituality & Human Purpose at the Dawn of AI – by pointing to the need for creativity in today’s fast-paced and instantaneous workplace culture, and asking what can be done to develop the workplaces of tomorrow.
“New entrants to today’s job market have grown up in an environment where the speed, scope and intensity of reaction – afforded by social media – further discourages risk- taking,” she said.
“Jobs provide us with both material comfort and psychological gratification. We need to work to feel engaged, to contribute. Whatever your definition of creativity may be, it is what we’re going to need in the workplaces of tomorrow, it is what we need in the workplaces of today.”
Moeschinger highlighted that the presence of measurability and big data have impacted on the psyche of an entire generation’s way of working, putting pressure on everyone to make the ‘right decision’ and backing it with data.
“We’re obsessed with big data and we value efficiencies over effectiveness,” she said.
“This has further compounded the loss of our creative skills... we’re becoming smaller, less bold, less childlike in our curiosity, and we’re increasingly hesitant to have a go.”
Going on to describe creativity as an innate, human skill, Moeschinger said this is progressively lost along the way
from school to university and then into the workplace, suggesting logic and rationality become learned, encouraged and practised, subsequently stifling creativity.
“Being rational is the opposite of being imaginative... why are we teaching knowledge when we should be teaching thinking?” she asked.
“We need to teach our children to think creatively, to reimagine and to challenge. Only this will help to develop skills they require in the future.”
On the topic of technology replacing humans in the workplace, Moeschinger suggested the 2020s will be a decade of re-employment rather than unemployment, as the shift in the division of labour will potentially net 58 million new job problems, according to The World Economic Forum 2018 Future of Jobs Report.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular, was put under the microscope, as the audience watched a luxury car advertisement based on a script created by AI, in a test to see how creative the technology can be.
Moeschinger was critical of the ad, saying that even though AI was only used for a small part of the process – script writing – it was, “the most awkward part; the storyline doesn’t quite make sense.”
“Its learning is programmed and although the results might be interesting, machines do not have what humans have – imagination and creativity
– but what machines are very good at, is processing and
16 | Food&Drink business | May 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au