[lemdj]

One way to address this is to have an explicit commitment as an organization that managers at all levels will regularly explain to their teams the context in which their piece of the organization is operating, and a process to make that happen.

[This is a concept I first heard about in Elliot Jaques' thinking around what he calls Requisite Organizations... I don't agree with all of his thinking, but this context-setting piece has always seemed crucial to high-performing larger organizations]

This has two big benefits: first, it should make it easier to assimilate higher-level managers' decisions and understand the motivations behind them and second, it puts everyone in a position to make better-informed decisions on their own.

As a simplistic (and not particularly realistic) example, if I am a dev manager trying to decide whether to devote time to new feature development or a refactoring effort, making the 'right' decision is dependent on knowing whether we have things in place to put a marketing push behind new features and generate new sales, whether we are at risk of losing existing customers due to latency issues that the refactoring would resolve, etc.

If the right context-communication process is in place, I know that answer and can easily both make my decision and communicate to the team why it is the 'right' one.