The thesis of our book is that organizations need to be more human. Social media has been succeeding very specifically because it taps into what makes us human, and our organizations seem very stuck in a machine-based worldview that is letting us down. So we identified four crucial elements of being human that need to be infused into our organizations: open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous. In Chapter 5 we talk about these human elements, why we chose them (as opposed to other aspects of being human) and how they are showing up in the real world around some very prominent social media related crises for organizations.

Of course bringing these elements into your organization is not going to be a simple task. We wish there were some sort of humanize wand you could wave that would infuse these elements into how you run your business, but there isn’t one. Instead, you’ll have to tackle the issue of organizational change, and that means specific work at three different levels in your organization: culture, process, and behavior. In Chapter 4 we explore what we mean by organizational culture, processes and structure, and individual behavior in the context of becoming more human. And we give some examples of how culture or process or behavior is actually getting in the way of taking advantage of the power of social media.

You put these two things together (the four human elements, plus the three areas of organizational change) and you get a nifty 4 x 3 matrix, that we call our trellis. For each human element there are three different aspects that need attention at the levels of culture, process, and behavior. Trustworthy cultures, for example, are about transparency, where the process level for trust is about enabling more truth to be spoken, and the behavior focus for trust is on authenticity. The trellis, explained in Chapter 5, pinpoints the twelve different aspects of human organizations that will require our attention moving forward.

And we very intentionally call it a trellis, rather than a model or a framework. We’re not giving you the answers here. We’re not giving you something you can copy or replicate in your organization. We are giving you a simple structure that you will use to grow your organization based on the unique realities you are facing. That’s what a trellis does. It supports the growth of the plants, but the gardener (and the plant) really do all the hard work of growth. The rest of the book (Chapters 6 through 9) digs into each human element of the trellis in more detail.

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