I was a little disappointed because I'd read an excerpt in a newspaper - probably the best pages. Still, an important subject.

I know quite a bit about this subject because my profession was complex IT system design, and I found the book was overly simplistic. This is not because some of the tools they suggest, such as for structured decision making on a small scale, are too simple; they're appropriate at the small scales and often things seem almost too obvious that people thing they don't need emphasizing. Atul Gawande's book [b:The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right|6667514|The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right|Atul Gawande|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312061594s/6667514.jpg|6862414] is a great example.
But these authors are not Atul Gawande and he did not go into detail on how and when the several ideas he introduced are useful.
In the end, I think they did an OK layman's job on Why Our Systems Fail, giving lots of anecdotes about failures and how they arose, but less so on What We can Do About It . There is a lot more to the subject than they hinted at. However, I gave it four stars because they did give a few useful ideas such as the pre-mortem, the idea of using structure decision making and so on, that are useful tools to have in your box. It also links examples of what we now know about the blind spots in human psychology to how to use teams to compensate.

In summary, not a bad book but I was hoping for better.