It’s a way to challenge what has been done and find new solutions, following the Hegelian dialectics that combining a thesis and its opposite, the antithesis, leads to a new understanding, or synthesis.
When computers were introduced, people predicted paperless offices. Instead, we now have more paper due to desktop publishing. The people who benefited most from these developments were those who considered the opposite outcomes.
We recognise all things by the existence of their opposite - day as distinguished from night, peace from war, failure from success.