Locations
Anti-visioning is a powerful yet unconventional exercise where teams imagine a future where their programme has failed. This approach enables proactive identification of risks, fostering the design of interventions that are more robust, resilient, and aligned with dynamic realities. The exercise is rooted in the principle that learning from potential failure can be more insightful than only envisioning success. By uncovering blind spots and vulnerabilities, anti-visioning encourages strategic foresight that minimizes risks while enhancing programme success.
However, anti-visioning can be an uncomfortable exercise for many teams. Poking holes in one’s own programme design can feel counterintuitive, even disheartening. It requires psychological safety, open communication, and an acknowledgment that vulnerability in this process is key to resilience.
To reduce bias, it is often helpful to bring in external perspectives—stakeholders, experts, or facilitators—who can challenge assumptions and offer fresh insights.
Research in psychology and decision-making validates the importance of visualizing failure. Techniques like premortem analysis—a strategy often used in business and project planning—highlight that by anticipating failure and working backward, individuals and teams can:
- Overcome confirmation bias, which leads to overlooking weaknesses in their own plans.
- Stimulate creative problem-solving by thinking critically about what might go wrong.
- Foster a culture of constructive criticism that strengthens programme design.
Overview of method
Using the Visioning Template for Anti-visioning
The same visioning template used to craft success stories for the programme can be repurposed for anti-visioning. However, each section of the template will be reoriented with questions focused on failure.
Below are the prompts for each section, using the youth unemployment challenge as an example:
From Risk Insights to Risk Statements
The anti-visioning exercise generates a detailed narrative of potential programme failure, providing valuable insights into risks that could materialize if certain challenges are not addressed.
Translating these insights into risks involves reframing the identified causes of failure into actionable risk statements. These statements describe potential events or conditions that could negatively impact the programme’s objectives, allowing teams to evaluate their likelihood, severity, and required mitigation strategies.
The outputs of the anti-visioning exercise will consist of ideas framed in the past tense describing why the programme failed. These ideas can be easily and intuitively reframed as risks to the programme, which can then be prioritized on the risk radar.
To reframe the key issue in the anti-vision exercise as a risk, you will need to focus on the key issue or event that contributes to the failure of the programme. For example, ask yourself, “What part of the anti-vision narrative describes an event, condition, or action that negatively impacts the programme?”
The answer you come up with could be, for example, “The training programmes didn’t match market needs”. This is a possible risk.
Some other risks that emerge from the example anti-vision exercise are:
The outcome of this exercise is a ‘laundry list’ of everything that could potentially go wrong in implementing the programme. However, not all risks are equal in their impact or urgency.
The next step is to map these risks based on their potential impact on the success of the programme and the ability of UNDP to influence of control the risk.
Click here to download the antivisioning template
Click here to see a one-page example of an anti-visioning exercise output
Click here to download an example workshop agenda for an antivisioning exercise
Read more about Option 2: Wintunneling