Why I Wrote Gears, Triggers, and Systems

I did not write this book to complain. I wrote it because something essential has gone missing and many of us feel it, quietly but persistently.

Gears, Triggers, and Systems is for engineers at heart. For those who once believed technology was a craft. That engineering was not just execution. It was stewardship, clarity, and care.

It is also for technical leaders who no longer recognise the discipline they once took pride in. Those who feel sidelined by politics, by fashion, by noise. Those who still ask the hard questions, even when the room has stopped listening.

A Profession That Lost Its Shape

Today, many of us find ourselves in what feels like a vanity marketplace. One where visibility outweighs value, and short-term storytelling replaces long-term systems thinking.

Non-technical roles, often well-meaning, now drive critical decisions with little grounding in field experience. Proven engineering methods are casually dismissed. Waterfall plans are made based on hopeful abstractions. Teams are assembled by instinct and politics rather than purpose and capability.

Engineers are reduced to implementers. Technical leaders are told to “stay in their lane.” Real consequences are obscured by performance theatre, and overconfidence (Dunning-Kruger effect) is amplified by AI that outputs faster than it understands.

And so a troubling shift unfolds: we remove the space for engineers to do their work seriously. We strip technical leaders of their agency. In doing so, we doom systems that might have endured, and businesses that might have deserved better.

This Book Is Not a Requiem. It Is a Reckoning.

Gears, Triggers, and Systems draws from disciplines that still respect consequence:

Railways. Aerospace. Automotive. Architecture. Firearms. Survival systems. Medicine.

These are fields where the cost of failure is public and often irreversible. Where systems are not imagined—. They are proven. Where feedback is structural, not optional.

The book is not bitter. But it is direct. It is written for those who still care.

For those who remember what real engineering feels like.

And for those who wish to reclaim it.

No Easy Answers—Yet

This book does not offer solutions. It was never meant to.

It was written to make space again for discipline, clarity, and respect—for what it means to build systems that others must trust.

The solutions will come in the next work: Foundations of Excellence, where I will focus entirely on how we restore technical credibility, build resilient platforms, and lead engineering teams with integrity.

Gears, Triggers, and Systems is the beginning. A challenge. A mirror.

It Is Time to Regroup

This book is not the end of something. It is the beginning of remembering who we are and choosing to stand by it.

If you read this and felt recognised, then let us not stay isolated.

Let us regroup. Let us reconnect. Let us rebuild trust in one another as engineers, as system thinkers, as leaders who carry weight rather than avoid it.

Entire companies, entire industries, were once built and sustained by engineers only, who were simply trusted to do their job. There is no reason why that cannot happen again.

Some of us still care. We are not alone.

🤝 Reinforce your network.

💪 Support those who still build with seriousness.

Because if we want systems to endure, we must begin by standing together.

Remember: you can follow the creation of the next book, Foundations of Excellence, on the blog.

📖 Gears, Triggers, and Systems is now available globally on Amazon.

Find it using ISBN 979-8281602310