The Problem Solving Leadership (PSL) workshop was created in 1974 by gerald-weinberg, dani-weinberg, and donald-gause as a five-and-a-half-day residential program designed to develop leadership capacity in technical professionals. It became the most enduring and arguably most important direct educational contribution of Weinberg's career.
PSL brought together small groups of practitioners—typically around 20 participants—in an intensive, experiential format that drew on virginia-satir's therapeutic frameworks, general-systems-thinking, and Weinberg's own models of congruent-behavior and the moi-model of leadership. The workshop was not a lecture series but a living laboratory in which participants encountered real problems, real conflict, and real feedback in real time. The approach embodied Weinberg's conviction that technical leaders cannot be trained by information transfer alone; they must be changed.
Over more than four decades, PSL produced more than 3,000 graduates, many of whom went on to become influential consultants, coaches, and leaders in their own right—including members of the aye-conference community. esther-derby, johanna-rothman, don-gray, and many others trace direct lines of influence to their PSL experience. When Weinberg's health declined around 2017, don-gray took over facilitation, preserving the workshop's format. The intellectual content of PSL was partially captured in psl-reader-2020. The methodology behind the workshop was codified in the experiential-learning-vol1-beginning-2016 series, which Weinberg published on Leanpub to make the facilitation approach transmissible.