Power tends to accumulate at the top of hierarchies.
The countervailing pressure is that information must travel up to be acted on, which is why centralisation and information loss increase together. Weber, Michels and Pournelle all describe the same drift.
In practice
- A team that promises autonomy finds every decision above a small threshold escalated within a year, and no one decided to centralise.
- A federation of local branches with a shared brand gradually finds the brand rules determine everything the branches do.