I would think it&#x27;d be even more efficient the more unknowns there are. If no one has the ability to listen to the differing opinions of the group and then initiate a course of action by deciding on one or more of the available paths, there are plenty of cases where no consensus is reached and everything goes in a bunch of different directions at once, or nowhere at all (as anyone who has witnessed the parade of &quot;YYYY will be the year of Linux on the desktop!&quot; jokes every year for the past 15+ years can attest to).<p>Now, hierarchy may not produce the most correct decision making, but it does produce decision making (not even &quot;quick decision making&quot;, just &quot;decision making&quot;). Nonhierarchical organizations can&#x27;t guarantee that. I also think there are large categories of business, design, marketing, or engineering decisions about which groups might never reach a consensus because each position is true and correct and attainable in isolation, but are not attainable when combined together.<p>I strongly believe that good engineering is all about optimizing compromises, and that it&#x27;s irrational human nature for us to even think that &quot;no compromises&quot; solutions to any nontrivial problems even exist. We might convince ourselves that the compromises we&#x27;re making don&#x27;t matter, but all that does is help hide a potential source of future problems. Compromise isn&#x27;t a dirty word in engineering, or at least it shouldn&#x27;t be.<p>That&#x27;s what having a hierarchy gives you- a way for people to argue their position as strongly as needed, an understanding that it&#x27;s natural for people to focus on different ways of looking at the same problem and coming to conclusions that are simultaneously correct and incompatible, and a mechanism (the hierarchy) that ensures action by either enforcing compromise or just picking a winner in situations in situations where a decision must be made but more than one correct but  incompatible solution is being fought for within the group.