During the recent hockey-disappointment-induced riots in Vancouver, Canada, and in the days that followed, the transparency and rapid news dissemination capabilities of social media were made abundantly apparent.

As the riot itself unfolded on live television, the riot’s instigators and youth caught up in the fray made countless posts to Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, recording and documenting their activities. Some of the images they posted were bizarrely compelling; others were undoubtedly evidence of criminal activity. (The ‘social media vigilantism’ of the following week has also been an interesting topic of vibrant discussion.) News of the riot quickly spread around the world, making cover stories in Australia, India and elsewhere. Vancouverites collectively hung their heads in shame that their fair city—which had received accolades for its positive celebrations during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games just 12 months before—should again showcase an ugly side.

Yet at the same time as the riot was unfolding, so too was the Clean Up Vancouver campaign. Launched on the night of the riots on Facebook, this simple campaign invited positive Vancouverites to come downtown the following morning to help clean up after their not-so-positive fellow citizens. By 7:00am, hundreds of people were downtown with brooms and dustpans; by noon, some reports suggested more than 10,000 had joined the Clean Up. Plywood boarding over the broken windows of one major retailer became the ‘Love Wall,’ on which people wrote messages of apology and respect.

This Jekyll and Hyde capacity of social media is both powerful and puzzling. It’s powerful in its capacity to rally thousands of people to positive action. Yet, it’s puzzling, because it as easily can be used to drive disruption. However and organization might choose to use social media and its unparalleled reach, posts and other content are there forever, for anyone to see. And it is precisely this unprecedented transparency that gives organizations pause. Should we open up?

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Mass urbanization around the world will see hundreds of millions of people flocking to the world’s cities in the coming decades. Already enormous cities like Delhi, Beijing, Mexico City and others are swelling by staggering proportions, and the stresses on infrastructure, the environment and social programs will be extraordinarily hard to manage.

Demands on non-profits and social service agencies are already overwhelming capacity. And those demands will soar in the coming decade as people migrate to urban centres looking for work.

The complexities inherent in these new population dynamics and their consequent social impacts are difficult to fathom. As with any other complex problems, smart practices will allow for effective solutions to emerge. One of those is the development of social enterprise, a nascent, but growing sector that in some pockets is even outperforming traditional commercial business. Already recognized as an important part of the ‘Third Sector’ in the UK, and flashing on to the policy radars of governments across North America, social enterprise is a useful alternative to charitable fundraising for many NGOs and not-for-profit organizations.

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As the world has watched the ‘Arab Morning’ spread across North Africa and countries of the Middle East this year, we have been amazed by tales of everyday heroism, and heartbroken by stories of unimaginable violence and loss. Last week, I opened my keynote presentation to the UK Institute of Fundraising‘s National Convention with one such story—that of Hamza al-Khateeb, the 13 year-old boy who was savagely beaten and murdered at the hands of Syria’s security forces.

Stories such as his strike a devastating blow to our faith in the goodness of humanity; sadly, it is too easy and far from accurate to dismiss Hamza’s story as the result of a deranged security officer. In fact, Amnesty has reported numerous other children and teenagers have been tortured and murdered since Hamza’s story broke around the world. So the problem is even more disturbing and complex than one would at first believe.

It is this complexity that fundraisers, activists and social change leaders face across a diverse range of issues and problems. From the Arab Morning to climate change to urban degradation, complex problems require distinct approaches from simple ones.

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After accumulating one of the greatest fortunes ever assembled, pioneering industrialist Andrew Carnegie dedicated his time and energy to spending it. Carnegie’s legacy is world famous, and delivered a global impact. I’ve written about him before. But this morning, I enjoyed reading a Huffington Post piece about ‘The New Carnegies‘—a collection of articles profiling some of today’s great philanthropists.

This morning’s piece focused on Jeff Skoll, the multi-billionaire who was the third person to join eBay. After helping to build that firm, and in the process, reinventing how commerce happens, Skoll has dedicated his time and his fortune to a focused, complementary group of companies and initiatives that collectively are working to address some of humanity’s and Earth’s most pressing problems.

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Larry Brilliant at Skoll. Image used with permission of Skoll World Forum.

Many of the challenges social enterprise aims to resolve are the greatest challenges faced by humanity: Poverty. Climate change. Conflict. And each is made more challenging by its interweaving with the others. Resolution of these global challenges requires us to “rejoice in complexity,” as was suggested by Stephan Chambers, Director of the MBA degrees at Oxford University’s Saїd Business School, during the opening plenary of the 2011 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

The Forum’s theme for this year was, “”Large Scale Change — ecosystems, networks and collaborative action.” Laudable on its face, the theme gave rise to a series of dialogues over the Forum’s three days that made clear big problems require big solutions. Social enterprise, and in particular its “undisputed star,” microfinance, has demonstrated its capacity to deliver that change, exemplifying Einstein’s assertion that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

The diversity of people, nations, ideas and enterprises present at the Skoll Forum certainly demonstrated our collective capacity to define new models and pursue new solutions. Yet few organizations have achieved scale without simultaneously diluting their impact. And therein lies the paradox:

As they grow, social enterprises’ capacity to be responsive and need-focused inevitably erodes.

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Archbishop Tutu. Image used with permission of Skoll World Forum

“Large Scale Change – ecosystems, networks and collaborative action.” This was the theme for the 2011 Skoll World Forum, March 30 to April 1, in Oxford, UK. The diversity of delegates’ nationalities, organizations, missions and ideas was matched only by the diversity of plenary, breakout and workshop session topics. Yet at least a couple of common threads united the conversations of the 900 assembled delegates.

One of these was the question of leadership, and more specifically its role in the development of large scale change.

Amid more than enough academic study, philosophical waxing and journalistic opining, ‘leadership’ has devolved in the past few years to nothing more than another example of rampant organizational rhetoric. Yet at Skoll, the profound insights of unquestionable leaders—Queen Noor of Jordan, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and our convener, Jeff Skoll himself—shed new light on the emerging revitalization of leadership. This dialogue was perhaps captured best by the question posed in one popular session:

Is Heroism Obsolete?

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