It's not a complicated process that requires certification. It's simple enough to be described completely in three minutes.
I'd also love to see an example of a problem you've encountered that is actually pure technology, since virtually all modern technology is created and maintained by humans. I've run into lots of crazy hardware and software problems, but pretty much all of them had a human involved here or there that could help make things better.
One failure that I see very frequently is that the analysis reliably stops at the invisible line between the trenches and the management.
I.e. the people-problems are very well identified by everyone in the room, but nobody feels like calling out the guy who sits on the other end of the table in your next "performance review". It just doesn't seem like a good idea.
This is something that I'd like to see people like Eric talk about.
Because either I live in my own personal bubble here or that is a much more common problem than people not knowing how to trace back a technical issue to people and processes.
In fact, every engineer I know could sing you a song about it. But again, perhaps I really just happen to live in a particular bubble far away from Harvard...
Maybe the problem is that 5Ys worked great and seemed like a nice process improvement because we had healthy management. I think the reality is - the unhealthy managers who could really benefit from Eric telling them how to be better managers? They're never going to go anywhere near HN or the Harvard Business Review.
I shared the same concern, but having heard Ries speak in the past, I think his use of "people" here is a bit misleading.
A commenter on the video made the good point that it's probably more accurate to refer to "process problems" than "people problems". I think this video may have been flavored by his audience, looking down from an upper-management perspective.
"People problems" implies that you need to keep people from messing up. "Process problems" includes more institutional problems: culture, training, scheduling, prioritization, &c.
Besides that I don't like how he oversimplifies the root cause of these problems he's talking about. He's pretty much saying that all problems in your company can be traced to people. It's a person that is always the problem according to this video. That's not so. The problem can be people or it can be ridiculous processes like going through "the 5 why's" or it can be anything else in the world including a random act of god. Hopefully Ries bounces back with something better. Hopefully he hasn't peaked like the business school version of a pop star who's 15 minutes are up.