ABSTRACT The leadership literature has not yet produced a formal construct capable of explaining how senior leaders design organisational environments in which initiative is the default rather than approval the default. This theoretical article introduces Permissionless Leadership as a governance-level leadership logic and develops it through abductive conceptual integration across empowerment, organisational design, innovation governance, and leader competence research streams. The framework specifies three interdependent dimensions: decision-rights architecture (the formal and informal structuring of who may act without prior approval, on what scope of decisions, and within what thresholds); risk and guardrail design (the differentiation of experimentation contexts into green, amber, and red zones by consequence magnitude and reversibility); and relational and competence infrastructure (the leader technical fluency and team psychological safety that enable soft control in lieu of bureaucratic oversight). The paper defends the theoretical distinctiveness of the construct by demonstrating that each existing stream is individually insufficient, that no current framework captures the configurational interdependence of all three dimensions, and that the high velocity digital innovation context creates a cost structure for delayed initiative that existing empowerment and governance theories have not addressed. Eight propositions are derived, including interaction and configurational effects, alongside explicit causal identification strategies for each, to support empirical testing. Boundary conditions specify scope constraints for regulated sectors, high-power-distance contexts, and different firm lifecycle stages. The paper closes with an operationalisation and research agenda oriented toward the causal designs that will allow the framework's propositions to be evaluated rigorously.