Growing interest in market shaping highlights the need to examine how some actors proactively envision and influence their markets. The early stages of market shaping involve visioning – the crafting of a future market vision and initiating changes to support this vision. Understanding how such visions emerge, the challenges encountered during visioning, and strategies for addressing these challenges represents an important research avenue. We propose framing market-shaping visioning as an ententional phenomenon, inherently incomplete and defined by its relation to what is absent. Drawing upon relevant literature we identify three distinct states of absence and using two longitudinal case studies we develop a framework that relates these states of absence to three phases of visioning in market shaping. We discuss managerial and theoretical implications, emphasizing the role of absence in understanding and guiding visioning in market shaping.