By establishing scales, organizations can systemically and progressively allocate, and regulate, attributions and responsibilities from the upper to the lower levels (top-down control). At the same time, however, each scale's preformance will depend on how its sub-scalesworks and so on, favoring the appearance of cascading failures that compromise the overall system's (bottom-up propagation) performance.

The relational uncertainty of a system represents the effect that the organization's multi-scale structure may have on the partial and global objectives, and will depend on the configuration of rights (atributions) and duties (responsabilities) that are assigned to each scale. A correct configuration will allow an good degree of decentralization, maximizing the advantages of a local implementation of overall planning, while minimizing the risks associated to the lack of direct control.