In every business, we are constantly managing resources. Money, knowledge, and technology are the traditional assets we refer to when we talk about management. They are the tools we mobilise to create value, build systems, and deliver outcomes. But when it comes to human beings, something subtle, yet critical, is often missed.

The idea that people can be “managed” in the same way we manage money, knowledge, or technology is not just mistaken. It’s dangerous. This confusion sits at the core of many underperforming, disjointed, or fragile organisations. In enterprise roadmending, one of the first tasks is to repair this misconception: we don’t manage people, we manage conditions.

Resources like money, knowledge, and technology have no agency. Money does not negotiate. Knowledge does not decide when to be used. Technology doesn’t wake up demotivated. These are inanimate tools, waiting to be activated by human agency. What happens with them is entirely up to us.

But people are not tools. They are not passive inputs. They are complex systems, some argue the ultimate complex systems, thinking, feeling, reacting, adapting. And yet, we continue to use the word “resource” as though people can be slotted into workflows and pipelines like interchangeable parts. This is the fallacy of control. It’s tidy on paper, but chaos in practice.

In every workplace, people are silently choosing between two fundamental stances: to protect themselves, or to prove themselves. This choice is rarely conscious. It emerges out of the interplay between culture, leadership, emotional safety, and purpose. A person operating in protection mode will do what is required; just enough, never too much. Their behaviour is defensive, strategic, at times masked by surface-level competence. But there’s no stretch, no spark.

In contrast, a person who chooses to prove themselves is willing to take risks, to stretch, to engage. They offer more than compliance. They offer themselves. Not in a way that’s performative or insecure, but in a way that signals trust in the system they’re part of. That is often, but not exclusively, manifested in a broader concept of workplace engagement. If a workplace quietly rewards protection and punishes initiative, managers will end up with teams full of smart people who never offer their full potential. And you’ll never quite know why.

Our current era is digital; deeply so. But not just in how we work. Digital logic is now shaping how we think, how we relate, and perhaps most problematically, how we manage.

We are not more technological than previous centuries, but we are more digitally conceptualised. That is, we increasingly see the world, including people, through the lens of digital systems. This seeps into how we manage. People are treated like apps: install them (recruit), run them (assign work), update them (training), optimise them (KPIs), replace them (performance reviews).

But people are not applications. They’re not free downloads. Their inner life isn’t a predictable codebase. Their “operating system” isn’t something we design. It’s something we have to respect.

And this matters, because many of the people-oriented processes we build are subtly shaped by digital metaphors. These metaphors might work for transaction systems or automated workflows, but they break down when applied to culture, trust, and human performance.

Culture is not an interface you design and roll out. It is not a system you “install” across an organisation. Culture is a living pattern. It emerges from interactions, stories, trust, conflict, and values-in-use (not just values-on-walls). It is shaped by every corridor conversation, every manager’s tone, every unspoken norm. Most critically, culture is a complexity at play; with unpredictable emergent properties that make it supremely distinguishable from the coded apps we use. And, let’s not forget the sacred truth of the essence of culture: it cannot be imposed; it can only be cultivated.

This is where leadership often hits its limit. You can influence. You can model. You can reinforce. But you cannot control. Culture is a complex system. And like all complex systems, it resists control and rewards attention.

Enterprise roadmending: a strategic approach I have used in a variety of settings, is not about rebuilding the entire highway. It’s about noticing the cracks and small disruptions before they become catastrophic failures. It’s a quiet discipline, subtle, patient, attentive. Enterprise roadmending applies this philosophy to people systems. Rather than reinventing org charts or launching new initiatives every time there’s disengagement or confusion, roadmending asks: what are the small, supposedly insignificant breakdowns we’re ignoring; what silent protections have our people built around themselves; where are the proving behaviours happening, and how do we protect them; what kind of micro-conditions are we creating through tone, policies, and norms?

These questions are not technical. They are cultural. And they cannot be answered by dashboards or project plans. You can’t download engagement. If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: human motivation is not an app you can install.

You can’t control people like you control money or machines. But you can create the conditions where trust, creativity, and initiative are more likely to take emerge. You don’t manage people; you steward complexity. You don’t design culture; you tend the soil. You don’t create performance; you make it possible.

And that’s the real work of leading humans in the digital age.