Author
Kerry Patterson
The researcher who turned a study of people good at hard conversations into one of the standard corporate texts on dialogue.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Kerry Patterson completed doctoral work in organisational behaviour at Stanford and taught at Brigham Young University before co-founding a training firm and, later, the company that became Crucial Learning, with the colleagues who share the Crucial Conversations byline.
He was the first-named author of Crucial Conversations (2002), which grew from the founders' studies of people their colleagues named as unusually good at high-stakes conversations, and he co-wrote its successors, Crucial Confrontations (later retitled Crucial Accountability), Influencer and Change Anything. He died in 2022.
The signature
The books Patterson co-wrote share one method: find the people others name as unusually effective, watch what they do, name it, and teach it as a sequence. The vocabulary of Crucial Conversations (silence and violence, the pool of shared meaning) comes from that habit of naming.