WASHINGTON — The Department of Operational Readiness and Strategic Alignment (DORSA) unveiled its 2024 Strategic Vision Framework on Tuesday morning at a press event featuring a branded podium, three deputy undersecretaries, and a PowerPoint slide that read simply: "The Future Is Now."
The document, which runs to 214 pages plus a 47-page executive summary for people who do not read 214-page documents, has been described by agency leadership as "a bold departure from legacy thinking" and "the most comprehensive articulation of our mission in the department's modern history."
It is the fifth such articulation in eleven years. The previous four also claimed to be the most comprehensive in the department's modern history. Officials confirmed this is consistent with the department's commitment to continuous improvement.
A Brief History of Transformational Transformation
DORSA's first Strategic Vision Framework was published in 2013 under the title Toward a New Operational Paradigm. It identified seven core priorities, called for a culture of accountability, and recommended the agency hire a consulting firm to assess its strategic alignment. The consulting firm submitted its findings in 2015, recommending the agency develop a new strategic vision.
The 2016 document, Accelerating Operational Excellence, adopted six of the original seven priorities, quietly retired the seventh without explanation, and introduced the phrase "data-driven decision architecture" seventeen times. It also recommended the agency hire a consulting firm.
By 2019, DORSA had produced A Framework for Strategic Frameworks, which senior officials at the time described as "the synthesis document the department has been building toward." It cited the 2013 and 2016 documents as evidence of progress. Independent reviewers noted the progress was not described anywhere in those documents, but acknowledged the citation was formatted correctly.
The 2022 Operational Realignment Initiative arrived eighteen months behind schedule, cost $1.4 million to produce, and contained a foreword acknowledging that "previous visions, while visionary, did not fully capture the department's evolving vision." It ran to 189 pages. Nobody has confirmed whether anyone read it.
This year's offering is 25 pages longer.
'A Complete Departure,' Officials Confirm
At Tuesday's launch event, DORSA Deputy Secretary Renata Holloway described the 2024 Framework as representing a "clean break from incremental thinking."
"We are not iterating on the past," she told assembled staff, several of whom had attended three previous launch events in the same conference room. "We are building something genuinely new."
Asked whether the new document had been cross-referenced against the 2022 Operational Realignment Initiative before publication, Holloway said the question was "a fair one" and that the team had "absolutely been informed by prior work."
Asked whether anyone had specifically read the 2022 document, she said the team had "been informed by the spirit of prior work."
The 2024 Framework identifies eight core priorities. Six are identical to those in the 2019 document. One was retired in 2016 and appears to have been reinstated without announcement. The eighth is "Resilience," a word that does not appear in any previous DORSA document but which, officials noted, "has always been implied."
Experts Weigh In From a Safe Distance
Dr. Margot Fenwick, a senior fellow at the Institute for Governmental Process Studies, reviewed all five DORSA documents for this publication and reported that the experience had been "clarifying, in the sense that I now understand how little clarity is possible."
"Each document cites the previous document as a foundation," she said. "But none of them appear to have been read as a foundation. They've been cited as a foundation. Those are different activities."
Fenwick noted that across the five documents, the phrase "lessons learned" appears 43 times. She was unable to identify a single lesson that was demonstrably applied.
A spokesperson for the consulting firm that produced the 2016, 2019, and 2024 documents confirmed the firm had not been retained to read the 2022 document, which was produced by a different consulting firm. The two firms have since merged.
The Consolidation Plan
In perhaps the most clarifying moment of Tuesday's press event, a junior communications officer distributed a supplementary fact sheet confirming that DORSA has commissioned a sixth document — a Strategic Vision Consolidation Report — intended to "synthesize learnings across all five framework documents into a unified strategic narrative."
The consolidation report is expected in late 2026. It will be produced by a consulting firm. Officials declined to confirm whether that firm would be required to read any of the five documents it is consolidating, but noted the project scope "allows for a literature review phase."
Deputy Secretary Holloway, asked whether the consolidation report would itself become the basis for a seventh vision document, paused for a moment and said: "We're focused on the present document."
The present document, for reference, is 214 pages long, describes the future, and is available on the DORSA website in a PDF format that agency IT staff confirmed is "not yet optimized for mobile" — a problem first identified in the 2016 framework and carried forward, unresolved, through all subsequent visions of the future.
A department spokesperson later issued a written statement confirming that DORSA "remains fully committed to the principles outlined in all five strategic frameworks" and that the agency "looks forward to building on this strong foundation going forward."
The foundation, by current count, weighs approximately 864 pages and has produced zero measurable outcomes. Officials describe this as a solid start.
