Working but Wrong

Working but Wrong examines how modern systems can function exactly as designed and still produce unreliable, misleading or unsatisfactory results.

Drawing on practical experience in engineering, servicing, administration and everyday technology, Gerald Bratley explores what happens when genuine understanding is replaced by procedures, computer screens, automated instructions and rigid systems.

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