While the Royal Navy offered detailed instructions for how to scatter a convoy, it offered no guidance for putting one back together

From The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux.  Page 130.

No one was more distressed than Commander Broome, who had pulled the six destroyers from convoy PQ-17’s core escort because he thought they could better protect the convoy by racing west with the cruisers to intercept the Tirpitz. Broome felt betrayed by the Admiralty. He signaled Hamilton that he was ready to turn his destroyers around and go back to the convoy. Hamilton replied it was too late: The Allied warships were already 150 miles from the point where the convoy had scattered. Broome noted ruefully that while the Royal Navy offered detailed instructions for how to scatter a convoy, it offered no guidance for putting one back together.

Broome did not know it, but officers on one of his destroyers, the HMS Offa, had discussed faking a mechanical problem and sneaking the Offa back to protect the convoy. “We very nearly did this,” recalled Vice Admiral W. D. O’Brien, who was a lieutenant on the Offa at the time. All his life, O’Brien would regret that he and other officers on the Offa did not press their captain to disregard the Admiralty’s order and turn their ship around. “Our instinct that we should turn back was right,” O’Brien recalled. “[I]t was a moment to disobey; there must always be a sense of shame that we did not do so.”

An excellent example of the tension in hierarchical organizations (commercial, political, or military) between central decision-making and distributed decision-making.  If the center has a complete picture and full awareness, then likely, their decision is best.  

But if they do not, what are the balance of probabilities for good outcomes between central and distributed decision-making?

Particularly, as in this case, the distributed decision-making was taking into account factors such as shame and self-respect which were independent of what was the best course of action for the actual mission.

Somewhat ironically, in this instance, the center did not have good or complete information and the results for PQ-17 likely would have indeed been better in terms of the mission had they been left to the distributed decision-makers.  

Centralized-decision making is powerful and can be beneficial when the conditions of current, accurate, and comprehensive knowledge are met.  Where they are not met, it is almost always better to default to distributed decision-makers.  Hence the core observation of Hayek's Problem of Knowledge.