visioning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of envisioning something, or of forming a mental image of it.

   The committee opened with a visioning session to map out the town's future.

   Effective visioning gives an organization a shared sense of direction.

   Similarvisualization, imagining

   Note

   Unlike the verb form, the noun can be counted. James Branch Cabell, in The Cream of the Jest (1917), writes of "pallid and feeble visionings": dim, broken glimpses that foretell a beloved's arrival. In that use it sits close to vision as something imagined one seems to see. It is a dreamlike, literary word, a long way from the planning talk of a visioning session.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of vision.

   The leaders are visioning a future without poverty.

   He spent the evening visioning the layout of his new studio.

   Note

   The verb vision behind this form is transitive in every use, so visioning needs an object: you are visioning a future or visioning a layout, never simply visioning. As a gerund it can head a sentence (visioning the layout took all evening) and still keep that object. Once it takes a plural or an adjective, as in the noun for the act, it has become a noun.

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