I developed a perspective on staff work and the evolving role of the staff that might be of help to you.

In the 19th century and well into the 20th, the difficulty of moving information and, I suppose, the nature of command, meant that the staff was primarily responsible for gathering information that the commander could use to make decisions.

Somewhere in the late 20th century, with the advent of e-mail, secure communications, powerpoint, and all the other techno-impedimentia, the role of the staff began to transform into filtering information to allow the commander to make decisions. This transformation continues and is not yet complete, but I believe that staffs twenty years from now will look superficially the same but will in fact function quite differently.

I say this because I spent most of the last couple of years of my staff career distilling mountains of info into ideas or propositions for the commander to digest or decide upon.