It's Always a People Problem

Definition

Weinberg's Second Law of Consulting: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." Calling something a "technical problem" is frequently a face-saving label rather than an accurate diagnosis — it lets managers treat an issue as outside their responsibility, when in fact even a genuinely technical failure traces back to some management action or inaction (who was hired, trained, supervised, or left unsupervised). The corollary he calls Marvin's Law sharpens the same instinct into a working heuristic: "Whatever the client is doing, advise something else" — because people stuck in a problem tend to keep repeating the approach that already failed, a lack of imagination or perspective that is itself a people problem.

In the Book

Weinberg argues that labeling an issue "technical" serves executives politically: it lets a manager request help without admitting personal incompetence, since "technical problems aren't really supposed to be a manager's responsibility," and no one can realistically keep every needed expertise in-house. He advises that the experienced consultant will avoid publicly pointing out that management hired and is responsible for the technical staff involved, while privately still looking for the people who should have prevented or caught the problem. He extends the logic to executives reviewing budgets: they should let managers disguise management consulting as "technical consulting" to save face, since everyone occasionally needs outside help. The related warning about managers who never call in outside consultants — because they're too close to their own problems to see how much trouble they're in — reinforces that the technical/people split is a matter of framing, not of what's actually broken.

Why It Matters

This is a diagnostic reflex applicable well beyond consulting: whenever an organization presents a failure as a pure technology, process, or "systems" issue, it's worth asking who chose, built, staffed, or maintained that system, and whether the technical framing is doing face-saving work rather than descriptive work. It reframes root-cause analysis as partly a political act — organizations have incentives to stop the causal chain at the most impersonal-sounding link — and gives a specific tell (an unwillingness to name any person or decision) for when a "technical" label should be probed rather than accepted.