The Top Three Lessons Avatar Can Teach Social Entrepreneurs

Avatar has officially broken all the box office records. It's made more than $2 billion in the global box office, and as of yesterday, it surpassed Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie in U.S. history. As I watched it yesterday for the second and a third (long story) time, I couldn't help think about a few lessons that social entrepreneurs could take from the movie. I'm listing my thoughts here, in ascending order. (SPOILER ALERT: I've tried not to give away too much, but if you haven't seen Avatar, you may want to turn back now.)

#3. The Profit Motive is Complicated and, Unchecked, Often Dangerous: This is the one of the movie's most obvious lessons, but still important to restate. The main conflict in Avatar is that a company from Earth is trying to get the indigenous Na'vi on a planet called Pandora away from their ancestral home because it sits on an extremely rich deposit of "Unobtanium," a metallic substance that sells for $20 million a kilo. The Avatar program is a scientific approach to learning more about the Na'vi and Pandora, which the company supports financially as a way to find a diplomatic approach to getting the Na'vi out of the way. At the same time, the company has a private army that's chomping at the bit looking for an excuse to go in with all guns blazing. As protagonist Jake Sully puts it, "This is what they do. When you're sitting on something they want, they make you an enemy so they're justified in taking it."

How much of our planet's history is a story of resource wars? One need look no further than the destruction of the Congo for its various minerals (including the Coltan that is an essential part of the silicon chips on this computer and yours). Social entrepreneurs get incredibly excited about the possibility of using markets to raise standards of living, end poverty and distribute important goods and services. But we can't get so caught in our own rhetoric that we forget that opportunities for profit often deny justice, rather than promote it.

#2: There Are Always Things We Don't Understand: Avatar is about the limits of humans to see the massive web of connections and relationships that create life. On Pandora, these connections are real, measurable and manifest, but still beyond even scientists' comprehension. Throughout the movie, you see the scientists trying to take samples and piece understanding together, but they're never fully able to comprehend the depth of interconnectedness that defines Pandora.

One of the great challenges with trying to scale any solution is creating pathways for local customization. The sort of education that helps stop the spread of HIV in Uganda may be totally inadequate for the realities of Thai life, for example. I think the only thing that social entrepreneurs can do is be humble to the reality that there are always things we don't understand, and create opportunities for others to teach and be co-creators.

#1: Persistence Matters: Avatar director James Cameron wrote the first basis for the script in 1994, and was originally planning on releasing the picture in 1998 after Titanic. He quickly decided, however, that the technology was simply not ready for the vision he had in mind. For the next decade, the project remained on the backburner. Eventually, the Avatar crew actually designed new types of cameras to better create the experience of Pandora. The actual production of the film took another four years, before it was finally released last December.

This point is simply that most things worth doing take a lot of hard work. Social innovation is certainly that way, and it's worth a reminder that end of the day, it's all about the hustle.

Photo Credit: Rego