> Stafford beer has developed a model for this, the viable system model.

It's worth noting that Stafford Beer dedicated a lot of his life to fixing very broken hierarchies which at their core tended to two extremes: management managing everything, crushing front-line autonomy; and management having no interest in anything outside metrics.

Beer took a cybernetic approach to designing organizational structures which is not at all unlike the design of electronic regulatory systems.

There are several of his talks online which are an accessible but easily-misunderstood introduction to the material he covered more fully in his books.