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Planning and Permitting

Valuing Expression: Leadership Roles/Responsibilities Within Interdisciplinary Teams

Ron Deverman and Barbara Stuckey

Tuesday, May 21
Baltimore Theater
3:45 PM

About the Session

The ability to lead effective teams is critical to successful project delivery and can be a fast-track path to career advancement.  Team leaders must foster a work environment where collaboration and deliberation can lead to an outcome that results in sound resource management decisions.  This interactive workshop session will provide team leaders and members with an overview of how to create an environment that attains the project goals, forms a collaborative, harmonious team and maintains productive working relationships among team members throughout the project’s duration.  Participants will actively learn:

  • How others think and the diversity of thinking styles,
  • The ThoughtPrint portrait of your team communication strengths,
  • Models for building interdisciplinary expressions/consensus, and
  • Techniques for achieving cross-disciplinary understanding.

About the Presenters

Ron Deverman

Ron Deverman, CEP, is Associate Vice-President and Principal Environmental Planning Manager for HNTB, a national engineering, architecture, and planning firm, managing environmental impact assessment projects for transportation infrastructure improvements such as transit, passenger and freight rail, roadways, and bridges. Ron has over 34-years-experience in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) with special expertise in community impact assessment, cumulative effects analysis, and other federal environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and Threatened and Endangered Species Act. Ron is currently the Program Manager for IDOT’s Office of Intermodal Project Implementation for the CREATE Program, a program of 70 rail improvement projects in the Chicago area; Ron is managing all activities for Phase I environmental, Phase II design and Phase III construction (see www.createprogram.org). Ron was recently awarded the HNTB Fellow Award for his exemplary commitment and dedication to HNTB and the environmental planning professions.

Barbara Stuckey

Spending a career lifetime working on communications tools has resulted in a communications system which Ms. Stuckey patented in 1998. (U.S. Patent No. 5,721,938) Designed to provide solutions for the communications crisis in the English-speaking world, this system has two applications: 1) how humans use the technology of thought to turn problems into solutions; 2) how to use computer environments for a new, “electronic” language which captures how thought becomes knowledge.

She supports the creation and application of this system from a bachelor’s degree in literature, minors in French and psychology from Mary Washington University, graduate studies in linguistics, and specialized expertise in cognitive science from The American and Catholic Universities and the Universities of Virginia and Denver. This natural-language methodology has produced programmed systems which the lay person can use for everyday needs in the workplace and which organizations can use for knowledge management for data-mining which supports decisions.