4 ms·

Sure, but if you have a general graph (network) of more than a few nodes all trying to communicate meaningfully with each other you quickly run out of bandwidth

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  If they are communicating through a heirarchy, you've got the same total communication volume over a smaller number of channels; either you don't get as much information integrated where it needs to be, or you do so on a slower best-case path; in addition, each non-leaf node in a heirarchy is a single-point-of-failure for all communication (and decision-making) involving the leaves underneath it. Heirarchy is both more failure prone and has worse best-case communication time between nodes than network, which is why many nominal hierarchies end up routing around those limitations and acting like networks, where formal authority follows the hierarchy, but much practical communication and decision-making is done on a network model, because real humans are pragmatic and route around the failures that inevitably arise in a hierarchical organization. This ends up compromising the ability of the hierarchical command structure to impose uniformity.