Detailed Command vs. Mission Command: A Cancer-Stage Model of Institutional Decision-Making

Those accustomed to acting within ‘normal’ bureaucracies will have experienced the degradation, distortion, and stunting imposed by inordinate levels of hierarchical ‘decision structure’, particularly under the critical time constraints so fondly exploited by John Boyd and his followers. Here, via an approach based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories, we explore this dynamic in detail, abducting ideas from the theory of carcinogenesis. The resulting probability models can, with some effort, be converted into new statistical tools for analysis of real time, real world data involving cognitive phenomena and their dysfunctions across a considerable range of scales and levels of organization.