Sustained organisational innovation depends less on motivational investment than on the governance conditions that determine whether knowledge can be acted upon without bureaucratic delay. Yet the governance mechanisms through which senior leaders convert distributed knowledge into authorised, bounded action remain theoretically under-specified. Existing frameworks address either the motivational antecedents of knowledge sharing or the firm-level design of dynamic capabilities, but not the leadership-level architecture that enables knowledge-to-action conversion at speed. This paper introduces Permissionless Leadership as a knowledge-governance framework that reconceptualises R&D and innovation governance as a knowledge architecture design problem. Three mutually constitutive dimensions constitute the framework. Decision-rights architecture structures the institutionalised conversion of local knowledge into authorised action by pre-defining who may act, on which categories of decisions, and within what thresholds of scope and consequence. Risk and guardrail design governs the contextual classification of experimentation knowledge into green, amber, and red zones, enabling knowledge application whilst containing its adverse consequences. Relational and competence infrastructure provides the sensemaking and coaching conditions through which tacit knowledge is transferred, failure signals are disclosed, and distributed judgement becomes organisationally coherent. Each partial configuration produces a characteristic knowledge-governance failure mode; full configuration generates adaptive knowledge capacity through three specific interaction mechanisms. The paper employs abductive theory-building applied to a curated corpus of 47 sources. Eight falsifiable propositions with identification strategies, four exogenous antecedents, and a five-step governance playbook are provided.