The book combines analyses of case studies with summaries of social science research, drawing on academic studies, accident reports, and original interviews. 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.