“Let the information and the messages flow directly toward their destination where possible.”
This pattern sounds intuitive, maybe even trivial: why would you deliberately send messages via detours when that is not required? The answer is that this rarely occurs consciously; it is the result of applying a convenient, well-known pattern overeagerly. The pattern in question is your good friend the Request-Response pattern, with or without the Ask pattern’s sugar coating. Overusing this pattern leads to unnecessary consumption of network bandwidth and increased response latency; thinking about forward flow lets you recognize these cases and improve your service quality.