If they are communicating through a heirarchy, you&#x27;ve got the same total communication <i>volume</i> over a smaller number of channels; either you don&#x27;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.<p>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 <i>formal</i> authority follows the hierarchy, but much practical communication <i>and</i> 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.