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37 among members of the project team. This includes what difference they are trying to make to primary and secondary stakeholders through the project. To create a common and shared idea of the future, project leaders must use and see language as an active agent in the creation of meaning. Bushe (1998) argues that as we talk to each other, we are constructing the world we see and think about, and when we change how we talk we are changing that world. From this perspective, dreams and visions of the future that are encoded in popular words or images, are a powerful force for shaping developmental programmes, projects and policies because we see what we believe (see Focus Box 3). Therefore, to have a shared vision, project leaders must consider the following characteristics of good project visioning according to Christenson & Walker (2004): 1. It must be understood - It must capture the core purpose, preferred future state and essence of the project objectives; 2. It must be motivational - It must make a convincing case for following the project vision concept that can be internalized by project stakeholders and that provides a compelling value proposition; 3. It must be credible - It must be consistent with stakeholder cultures or sub-cultures to appeal to the assumptions and values level so that the vision statement artifact resonates with them; 4. It must be demanding and challenging - It should be proactive to facilitate teams to work smarter and more effectively, perhaps identifying stretch goals. Visioning tools: Not just Fancy Words but Practical Tools Projects can rely on discussion methods for groups such as dream-realised or story-boarding to create a common and shared vision of the future with project stakeholders. In this chapter, only the methods known as dreams-realised or visioning will be discussed. For use of story-boarding see Andersson, Öberg & Eriksson (2011) on how they can be used in projects. According to IFAD (2002), the purpose of dream-realised or visioning is to have a focused discussion around people’s dreams or shared vision for the future of a project or other activities. In projects and indeed monitoring and evaluation, this method is used to identify project indicators, understanding if primary stakeholders feel that their well-being is increasing or not, and helping project stakeholders reflect on the relevance of the activities of the project based on people’s vision of the future. For instance, in a project of empowering women, a project starts by asking women what ideal empowered women and their immediate surrounding environment should look like. The women themselves can them sketch or complete a sketch showing their ideal future. From the sketch, the project can then develop indicators reflecting aspirations of the project beneficiaries for whose values the project exists. The project will then track the