Review of Jacquie Read “Communication patterns” book

It happens from time to time, that I pick up the book to read, and then I get something totally unexpected from it. That was my story with the “Communication patterns” book by Jacquie Read.

The book I am reviewing today was not a conscious purchase. I got it in the HumbleBumble special offer, as a part of the architecture books bundle. However, as I am more into soft skills recently it looked reasonable to put aside yet another architecture book, and concentrate on something from the soft skills area. The title sparked my interest, and that’s how it started. What did I expect? Psychology-like book about communication between people but in the IT industry. The subtitle of the book – “A guide for Developers and Architects” – justified that expectation. It’s not any kind of secret, that communication in general is a hard task, and people in IT (used to deal with compilers, code and bugs) struggle with it heavily. 

What did I get? For sure not the another iteration of “Nonviolent communication” book¹. Jacquie Read is an architect, and she is building on that to teach effective collaboration and communication patterns within the projects. Hence the book I am reviewing today. The author does not concentrate about the actual process of inter-people communication, but rather on the tools and settings in which this communication occurs. If you are somehow aversive towards talking about emotions, feelings et cetera² – you won’t find them here. Ok, so what do we get?

The book with four parts, describing every aspect of the modern communication tools and patterns. I would argue that all of them are not only limited to the IT world. Obviously, as the book was written by the software architect, the samples come purely from the software engineering field. In my opinion though, the book should be understandable by every regular person working in a modern mid to large sized company. Which is a good thing, as the tips presented by Jacquie Read can be used for everyone’s benefit. 

My claim is supported by the areas covered by the author. Visual and multimodal communication, communicating knowledge and remote communication are the main areas. As I’ve mentioned previously – it’s not about direct face to face communication. Tips are about tools and solutions that we should be using, in order to make ourselves better understood and knowledgeable. Starting from fixing your presentation slides, through writing more clear docs, sharing knowledge within the org to supporting remote-setting work. Everything is provided in the book with short and very specific chapters. There’s no need to read this book cover to cover (and that’s what the author says in the introduction). If you feel like there’s an area you struggle most – just jump right into the dedicated part or chapter. Short, bullet-point style is a huge bonus. 

Are there any flaws in this book? Honestly – I don’t know. Truth to be told, I have never read anything specific about the topics covered in this book. Therefore I have nothing to compare it to. I find this book a great go-to manual, and I would recommend treating it like one. You can find my notes from this book in my knowledge repository GitHub repo. Bon appetit!

1. For those that do not dwell that much in the psychology or philosophy – I am referring here to the seminal book by Marshall Rosenberg titled “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life”
2. Not that I think that it is a good solution in general, but sometimes people are just discarding the content immediately after they hear that it speaks of one of those words.