Only in a very hierarchical organisation are the lowest levels without direction -- because the higher levels maintain their position by keeping important information secret.
If the important information (market signals, experiment outcomes, financial data, etc.) is made available to everyone, and everyone receives a sliver of training in interpreting it, any group of engineers worth their salt can make responsible decisions in the right direction. (Often much better than a small set of executives would.)
I like the idea, and I've seen it work for teams focusing on a single project/product. What's unsolved for me is how to scale this.
Interpreting data takes time, figuring out a strategy that spans multiple projects and years takes time... not sure this is workable to do individually. I'm all for being transparent with goals, that would be a given for me in any kind of organization - hierarchical or not. But somebody needs to keep up with the ideas of the engineers, customer requests, business goals and changing markets to put everything into an actionable strategy. In bigger orgs this is an ongoing process and requires full-time dedication... It would be really hard (but very interesting) to come up with a process to 'crowd-source' those things from 100+ engineers, skipping the middle-management positions.
Only in a very hierarchical organisation are the lowest levels without direction -- because the higher levels maintain their position by keeping important information secret.
If the important information (market signals, experiment outcomes, financial data, etc.) is made available to everyone, and everyone receives a sliver of training in interpreting it, any group of engineers worth their salt can make responsible decisions in the right direction. (Often much better than a small set of executives would.)