VISTA Planning & Management Part 1: Complexity

When VISTA projects fail, it is almost always for one reason - a gross underestimation of the complexity involved. VISTA is one of humanity's most complex creations. It pushes far beyond our capacity to fully comprehend it, and therefore to successfully make plans about it as a whole.

VISTA projects that might succeed are easily distinguishable from those that will fail. Right at the beginning, during the initial planning is when most VISTA disasters are wound up like a clockwork mechanism, after which they run down to their inescapable conclusion regardless of the intelligence, experience, power, funding, or passion of the project's participants. Prudent and experienced VISTA strategists can look at the initial sketches and tell promising from doomed within minutes at a better than 90% rate of accuracy. This skill can be learned by those new to VISTA planning and management, if they can come to grips with VISTA's complexity.