What design pattern or proramming technique to use to separate data flow from control flow?

In a distributed system there is one management instance and multiple processing instances. The management instance sends commands to the different processing instances. So the processing nodes need to have some command parsing logic and more logic to act on these commands.

Throughput is important for the processing instances so the actual data flow should be impacted as little as possible.

Is there a design pattern or programming technique I can use to clearly separate data and control flow in the processing instances while keeping performance of the data flow as high as possible?

I'm targeting C++17, if that should be of any concern.