Working but Wrong: Why Modern Systems Silence Understanding – and why it matters
Modern technology rarely breaks.
It reports, measures, warns, resets, and reassures.
And yet, something keeps going wrong.
In Working but Wrong, Gerry explores a quiet but dangerous shift that has taken place across engineering, transport, manufacturing, public services, and everyday life: the replacement of understanding with procedure, and judgement with compliance.
This is not a book about nostalgia, nor an argument against technology. It is a forensic, clear-eyed examination of what happens when systems are designed to function flawlessly — while discouraging the humans inside them from questioning whether they are correct.
Using transport and vehicle systems as a central thread — from early repair cultures to software-controlled diagnostics — the book traces how Britain moved from engineering as problem-solving to fitting as process-following. Along the way, it examines apprenticeships, modular design, sensors, software gatekeeping, and the hollowing out of local skill and repair capability.
At its heart is a simple but unsettling idea:
a system can be working exactly as designed and still be unsafe.
Drawing on nearly six decades of experience across British industry, international trade, government, and post-industrial economies — including work in South Yorkshire, South Korea, and post-Soviet Ukraine — Gerry connects technical systems to human behaviour, incentives, and policy decisions.
You’ll find:
- Why modern warning systems often train us to ignore them
- How software has quietly become the final authority — and gatekeeper
- Why repair disappeared not through malice, but through incentives
- How skills, communities, and resilience eroded together
- Why pragmatism and scepticism matter more as systems grow more complex
Working but Wrong is written for engineers, technicians, policymakers, managers, and thoughtful readers who sense that something essential has been lost — not because people became less capable, but because systems stopped allowing them to think.
This book does not call for a return to the past.
It asks whether we still value understanding — and what happens if we don’t.