Ken Knutson attended the Operations Academy Senior Management Program in 2023 and returned to his position as Traffic Engineer for Operations for the Eastern Region at Washington State Department of Transportation (WashDOT) with a completely new perspective on how to be a better communicator and problem solver for his agency.
At the Operations Academy, Ken met people from all over the country from different local and state agencies, all of whom brought different, valuable insights. In other states and agencies, problems encountered may be like his own but are solved differently. Sharing those experiences was very helpful.
“It was an eye-opening experience to find out that we do things our own way, sometimes only because it’s the way we’ve always done them, but we can all learn to put new things into practice that you can learn about when you’re with other people,” he said. “Those exchanges and group activities were very good for me.”
Sitting in sessions over the Academy’s two-week period and collaboratively finding solutions to problems they were each trying to resolve was very impactful. Everyone in each group offered a problem they were struggling with in their agencies. The group discussions about articulating the problem, and then sharing all their attempts to find solutions that were unsuccessful as well as successful had been a great experience.
However, the most significant takeaway from his experience in the Operations Academy had come from the sessions focused on communications. Although everyone knows communication is necessary, the speaker had provided so many useful tools for everyone to use in their daily work, and he had gained a particular appreciation for the need to improve his communication skills.
“We have to articulate our plans to our decision makers in our agencies, whether it’s our senior leadership or even our politicians,” he said. “We can work for long periods of time, and spend thousands of dollars, but if we can’t get our leadership to agree with our plans because we didn’t communicate them well enough, then we have not helped our taxpayers.”
Learning more about how to communicate with a certain audience, learning what motivates decision makers, and what is important to them was key information. Decision makers do not necessarily see the world the same way people on his team do, but unless communication is efficient, their plans will not come across to them.
“Reading my audience is something really important that I learned and brought back with me,” he said. “I did not appreciate that as I should have until I participated in those sessions.”
Before coming to the Operations Academy, he had many “blind spots” about what was going on in some parts of the transportation industry. He said prior to coming, he had known nothing about commercial vehicles and the trucking industry and only very little about planners and emergency responders.
“I was always focused on commuters, but now I understand that commercial vehicles are a major player in the industry,” he said. “They get complained about a lot, but they play a huge role in our economy, and that offered me a lot of insight I didn’t have before.”
WashDOT has sent many others to complete the Operations Academy, and his own supervisor is also an alumnus of the program. “People who have gone through the program have definitely moved up,” he said. “It could be a feather in my cap if I applied for a promotion in my organization.”
The work had been challenging, he said, but totally worth the effort. With the support from his agency, he was able to put in the long hours needed to complete the work, but the benefit that it had yielded had been advantageous to him personally and professionally.
“We came out of the Operations Academy better engineers, better planners, and better administrators,” he said.
