C&C governance rests on three implicit assumptions about the information pipeline. The tech industry structurally violates all three.
The three assumptions:
Compression. When information is summarized upward through the reporting chain, the compression preserves the signal that matters for decision-making. Theoretical grounding: Hayek (1945) on the irreducible locality of knowledge.
Proxy validity. The quantitative metrics available to decision-makers correlate with the reality they are managing. Theoretical grounding: Austin (1996) on measurement dysfunction. Partial measurement doesn’t just miss what’s unmeasured; it actively degrades it by redirecting effort.
Separability. Decision-making and execution are distinct activities that can be cleanly divided between levels of the hierarchy. Theoretical grounding: Brooks (1986) on essential vs. accidental complexity. In software, execution IS decision-making because every act of building code is a design decision, and software decisions compound.
These assumptions hold in manufacturing, pharma, aviation, and military operations. They fail in tech because of essential complexity (Brooks): the irreducible difficulty of the problem domain means information resists compression, metrics can’t proxy for craft, and the decision/execution boundary doesn’t exist.
Evolution: Originally formulated as four assumptions (adding fidelity). Fidelity was cut because it is a general organizational requirement, not C&C-specific. Any governance model fails if the reporting chain distorts information. The remaining three are specific to C&C’s structural dependence on centralized decision-making.
The framework’s contribution is diagnostic: it identifies which preconditions C&C depends on and shows that tech violates them structurally, not contingently. The mismatch is inherent in the domain, not fixable by better tools or smarter executives.