Soldiers regularly have to deal with the four forces dubbed VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). In particular, Mr Gareth Tennant [formerly of the Royal Marines] cites the concept of mission command which developed during the Napoleonic wars. Armies found that, by the time messages had arrived at the front, the military situation had changed. The lesson was to establish what the army was trying to achieve before the battle and allow junior commanders to use their initiative and take decisions as the situation demanded.
The ideal command structure is not a rigid hierarchy, he argues, but a sphere, where the core sets the culture and the parts of the organisation at the edge are free to react to events outside them. In effect, the contrast is between centralised command and decentralised execution.
"What the armed forces can teach business." The Economist. Oct. 24, 2020
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