[5] Clearfield and Tilcsik took top honors in the 2015 competition for The Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize with their proposal for a book about how to understand systemic risk and prevent catastrophic failures in business and beyond.

The authors warn that companies, governments, and even individuals have become dangerously reliant on complex, tightly coupled systems and are ignoring simple fixes that could avert both accidents and intentional wrongdoing.

The case studies include, for example, a failed social media campaign at Starbucks, a Thanksgiving dinner gone awry, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Flint water crisis, Nasdaq’s botched handling of the Facebook IPO, the accidents of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, the electronic trading meltdown of Knight Capital, the crashes of flights ValuJet 592 and Air France 447, and the June 2009 Washington Metro train collision.

The academic research covered in the book comes from sociology, psychology, behavioural economics, organizational theory, and neuroscience, including studies by Charles Perrow, Diane Vaughan, Karl Weick, Amy Edmondson, Dacher Keltner, Gary Klein, Gregory Berns, Daniel Kahneman, and Georg Simmel, among others.

"[14] Writing for Forbes.com, Brook Manville called Meltdown "a thought-provoking new book" and wrote that the authors "colorfully explain why your job, like everyone else’s in today’s global economy, is becoming part of bigger networks of co-dependent systems, laden with unforeseeable risks and unimaginable outcomes.

"[19] The National Business Book Award committee praised Meltdown for presenting "an innovative and engaging account of how seemingly unconnected disasters in the nuclear, medical and transportation sectors (to name a few) share common causes" and "applying leading-edge social sciences research with riveting real life stories... [to] explain how the increasing complexity of our systems create conditions ripe for failure and how our brains can't keep up.