VISTA Planning and Management Part 2: The Paradox of Success

Past success with other projects can lead directly to failure with VISTA projects. The greater the past management success elsewhere, the greater the chance of failing to manage VISTA successfully. It is not an absolute correlation but a strong one and a major risk.

The problem is not unique to managing VISTA. It is an under-recognized problem in life generally, most famously described as Maslowe's Hammer:

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance, 1966
and earlier described and explained as Kaplan's Law of the Instrument:

"The price of training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently . . ." -- Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, 1964