In my transformation work I often end up advocating for the role that greater autonomy can have in helping (large) businesses to move faster and be more manoeuvrable. This is particularly true in the context of small, multidisciplinary teams that can act as the engine for real change. If those teams are going to iterate properly, and have the kind of working culture and practices that enable them to move fast and be truly adaptive, higher levels of autonomy removes unnecessary hierarchy and enables speed of decision-making within the areas that they have responsibility for.
The common challenge to this is often focused around governance and alignment. This becomes especially important when you have multiple small teams working in this way. If you have a number of teams iterating rapidly how do you ensure that they are working on stuff that matters to the business? How do make sure that they are all heading in the right direction and working to the kind of standards that facilitates a fast-and-roughly-right mindset but doesn't compromise on the areas where the business cannot fail?
The best framing for this that I've used is Spotify's concept of 'aligned autonomy' which seeks to strike the right balance between high levels of autonomy and flexibility, and the need to marshall progress to make it all go in the same direction. It's captured in this clip, taken from Spotify's renowned films that describe their engineering culture:
Spotify famously structure their teams into Squads, Chapters and Tribes, a resourcing idea that is gaining much greater traction now as a way of bringing organisational adaptiveness to life through the way in which you structure your capability (for a case study of a scaled version of this, check out this write up of ING Bank).
Jeff Bezos once talked about how Amazon is 'stubborn on vision' but also 'flexible on details'. You still need that common direction and strong alignment, but you also need the flexibility and autonomy to move fast. Bringing those things together is the secret of success. Alignment enables autonomy.