Meltdown: What Plane Crashes, Oil Spills, and Dumb Business Decisions Can Teach Us About How to Succeed at Work and at Home Paperback – March 19, 2019

Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik have written, in Meltdown, a very powerful and social scientifically grounded account of system failures and how to overcome them.From the start of the book, I knew I was in for a ride. The authors set the tone with a brief but vivid story, one that concisely conveys a person’s life, only to see that life cut violently short in a system meltdown. A tragic beginning – and a profound start – one that foreshadows the rest of book’s storytelling approach of connecting personal stories to big ideas. With stories like this, carried on throughout the entire book, Meltdown overcomes a crucial roadblock to making social science accessible to a general audience: reader motivation. More simply put, Meltdown keeps us reading through its presentation of vivid imagery and detailed storytelling.As readers, we can come for the stories, but then stay for the science. That’s the other big component of Meltdown, of course; the storytelling is all in the service of making a set of social scientifically grounded arguments. And those social scientific accounts are, at least as far as I’m concerned, highly credible. Tilcsik and Clearfield draw on a wealth of organizational, sociological, and psychological research to make their case, reaching back to some of the social scientific classics (e.g., Simmel, Perrow) to more recent research. It is all very effectively done.Moreover, the science is clearly and accessibly communicated. Social scientific theory is brought stunningly to life—most thoroughly so in the chapter about Perrow’s foundational work—through that same storytelling strength that courses through the veins of Clearfield and Tilcsik’s book. In fact, the science is so well communicated and illustrated that, practically speaking, I have found myself not quite being able to shut up about Meltdown in day-to-day conversations. I’ve regaled both academic colleagues and friends from outside the field of organization theory with insights and stories from Meltdown—and suddenly, the conversation gets a lot more interesting. Or more interesting to me, at least, because I'm a nerd. Anyway.That comes to my final point. You can actually use this book. If you pay enough attention to the book’s insights and implications, both obvious and subtle, you can definitely gain something from it—whether it is in figuring out which part of your system is most prone to disaster through an analysis of its complexity and coupling, increasing the transparency and objectivity of your decision-making processes, trying to build more slack into your Thanksgiving dinners, or intentionally getting out of your comfort zones with diverse and dissenting teams. Or maybe it’s about sharing the book’s stories and ideas with friends and colleagues and starting an interesting dialogue.

Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik have written a important book looking at why so many of our highly complex systems are prone to failure. It is both a book about engineering and about business , which makes it even more compelling. Their examples run the gamut from Three Mile Island to the Recent Academy Awards where La La Land was mistakenly awarded best movie. They describe systems on two axis - Complexity and how coupled they are. For example: a nuclear plant is both complex and a tightly coupled system. When things go wrong, it is very difficult to diagnose the system in time. The warning of the book is that more and more systems are both with strong examples from social media and even Target's disastrous roll-out in Canada.The book also present a series of solutions to better manage these risks along with examples of their successes. Some examples include that increasing diversity within a board tends to reduce the amount of group think as they force everyone to relook at basic assumptions. They highlight backcasting as a valuable technique - look at a negative outcome to figure out what would have happened for the system to reach that state.Meltdown describes the problem of highly complex and highly coupled system and present strategies to overcome them. It doesn't matter if you looking at a nuclear power plant or in charge of expanding your business - this book is invaluable. Highly Recommended!

This book is a duty of systems and systems thinking. If you are a newcomer to how systems, feedback loops, points of failure, etc, this is the book for you. However, if you are already versed in how systems works, you may find yourself wishing that the authors had gotten to the point(s) a bit sooner than they did. I feel like the book was about 75 pages too long. Other than that, interesting enough stuff.

Even if this book weren't assigned reading for me, I would probably go ahead and read the whole thing. The book is chock full of great and well documented information. The style is very familiar and easy to read. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes surprising, but always informative. Very good book, highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about failure.

"Meltdown"'s thesis is that complex tightly-coupled systems are (a) prone to breaking disastrously, (b) have become pervasive over the last few decades, but (c) that this danger can be alleviated in several ways.The thesis is illustrated rather than proven- this is journalistic non-fiction, not academics. However, the illustration is both compelling and entertaining. The authors take familiar but seemingly disparate disasters- the Flint water crisis, the space shuttle explosions, the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear crises, and so on, explain how these systems were both complex and tightly-coupled, and show how those features lead to disastrous results. They then go on to show how these issues have been dealt with successfully in certain industries and organizations (e.g., US aviation, the Jet Propulsion Lab) and show how these countermeasures are generally applicable.I found the "complex tightly-coupled" framework and its application to familiar crises eye-opening and thought the suggested counter-measures made sense. A worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in how disasters happen or who is involved in running any large system.