Co-authored with johanna-rothman, esther-derby, and don-gray, the PSL Reader was published posthumously on leanpub in 2020, two years after Weinberg's death in August 2018. It serves as a companion and preparation text for the Problem Solving Leadership workshop — the intensive week-long event that was the capstone of Weinberg's teaching practice for decades.
PSL was not a conventional training course. It was an immersive experience designed to surface and examine participants' leadership patterns under conditions of genuine uncertainty and complexity. The workshop had a reputation as transformative — people described it as one of the most demanding and valuable learning experiences of their careers. The PSL Reader makes the workshop's conceptual foundations accessible to participants and to those who cannot attend.
problem-definition is at the heart of PSL's approach. The workshop's central discipline is slowing down the rush to solutions long enough to ensure that participants are actually working on the right problem. Most leadership failures, Weinberg taught, are not failures of problem-solving but failures of problem-finding — the hard work of recognizing what situation you're actually in.
The moi-model and satir-change-model provide the primary frameworks. PSL puts participants in situations where their characteristic motivational patterns and stress responses become visible — and where the workshop community provides enough safety to examine and experiment with those patterns.
Publishing this text posthumously was an act of stewardship by the co-authors, who had been PSL faculty alongside Weinberg for years. The book preserves the intellectual inheritance of one of the most influential leadership development programs in the software world and ensures it remains accessible to future practitioners.