# Full Text: The Innovator's Catechism

> Extracted from `2020_InnovatorsCatechism.pdf`

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The Innovator’s Catechism 
 
December 21st, 2020 
 
Richard J. Cordes 1,2,3, Daniel A. Friedman 1,2,4, 
AND Steven E. Phelan 5  
(1) COGSEC,  
(2) Remot or Consulting Group,  
(3) The Atlantic Council GeoTech Center,  
(4) University of California, Davis, Dept. of Ent omology  & Nemat ology, 
(5) Fayetteville State University , Dept. of Graduate & Professional Studies in Busines s  
A B S T R A C T
 
Innovation teams formed in incubators, research accelerators, hackathon weekends, and 
within organizations need to quickly align on narrative, workflow, and objectives in order 
to achieve success. Many of these teams disintegrate or fail to perform due to lack of 
alignment. Operations orders, such as those in use by the military, have demonstrable 
impact on organizational efficacy and success. This paper summarizes the history, 
development, and impact of military operations orders, discusses the history and 
development of their business counterparts, and presents the “The Innovator’s 
Catechism”, a catechism-styled operations order for use by early-stage innovation teams. 
This operations order is built from the “Facilitator’s Catechism”, an operations order for 
rapidly formed research teams, with acknowledgment for the special information 
requirements present for emergent and early-stage teams that are market-facing. 
 
Contents  
Introduction .......................................................................................................................2 
Operations Orders ..............................................................................................................3 
Military Operations Orders ...........................................................................................4 
Impact on Organizations ............................................................................................. 10 
Business Operations Orders ........................................................................................ 13 
Gray Zone Operations Orders ..................................................................................... 19 
The Innovator’s Catechism .............................................................................................. 22 
Discussion........................................................................................................................ 31 
Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 33 
Appendices ...................................................................................................................... 44

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Introduction 
An invention is something that is new and potentially useful. An 
innovation, on the other hand, is an invention where the benefits, 
financial or otherwise, exceed the costs of developing and executing 
the idea. A patent is one measure of invention. Around 400,000 patents 
are granted each year in the United States for ideas that are new, useful, 
and non-obvious. Sadly, however, 95% of these patents will never be 
licensed, indicating a systemic failure to create value [1].  
Traditionally, invention and innovation have been seen as branches of 
creativity and therefore resistant to formalization, relying instead on 
sparks of genius or Eureka moments [2]. Despite this, leaders and 
entrepreneurs would dearly love to find ways to lower the cost of 
innovation and prioritize ideas that create the highest value. Innovation 
management is the study of techniques to bring order to this chaos.  
This paper begins with the observation that high reliability 
organizations (HROs) tend to have the highest level of formalization 
or structure in terms of carrying out successful projects. HROs include 
air traffic control, emergency services, space travel, and operating 
rooms where failure is not an option. The military also has a very 
structured operational approach that maximizes coordination between 
subordinate units and minimizes casualties. This approach is known as 
an operational order or OPORD. The paper starts by considering 
whether the structure of an OPORD (or similar device) can be used to 
increase the reliability of innovation management.  
A catechism is a set of formal questions set as a test, most commonly, 
of religious doctrine. In the mid-1970s, DARPA, the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency, famous for inventions like the internet and 
GPS, was struggling to bring more structure to its innovation process. 
The agency introduced a set of questions, known colloquially as the 
Heilmeier Catechism, to help evaluate and compare research proposals 
[3].   
Cordes and Friedman (2020) have extended the DARPA catechism by 
overlaying an OPORD structure, which they termed the Facilitator’s 
Catechism [4]. It was always envisaged that the Facilitator’s Catechism 
could be modified for various use cases including innovation 
management. This paper combines the Facilitator’s Catechism approach 
with Blank’s recent discussion on an innovation pipeline to produce a 
family of innovator catechisms. The result is a series of structured 
questions that innovators can ask at each stage of the innovation 
pipeline to improve the reliability and effectiveness of innovation 
teams.

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Operations Orders 
Organization in the cooperative pursuit of common aims and objectives 
is not uniquely human, but the outcomes of the collaborative pursuits 
of our species certainly are. The successes of human cooperation are 
due, in part, to the purposeful, iterative refinement of the frameworks, 
processes, tools, and techniques used to increase the reliability and 
performance of teams. Productive novelty in problem solving, or 
innovation, is required to deal with the modern global landscape of 
challenges. In addition to the digital and internet revolutions, the 
modern workforce is seeing changes in the fluidity of team membership 
and the vertical and horizontal scale of team composition, such as 
increases in bureaucracy, layers of leadership, the number of 
individuals occupying the same teams or roles, and the number of 
remote and temporary workers. In these settings, there is an increased 
emphasis 
on 
inter-organization roles, 
strategies 
for 
managing 
workflow, 
team 
communication, 
and 
organizational 
culture. 
Organizations use evolutionary pressures and continued study and 
refinement in order to maintain reliable performance [4,5]. Informing 
this refinement in modern times, is research on industrial and 
organizational psychology (IO psychology), sensemaking, active 
inference, narrative construction, entrepreneurship, and high reliability 
organizations (HROs), each providing their own perspectives to reduce 
the enigmatic nature of team performance.  
The overlapping domains within IO psychology emphasize the 
psychological and psychometric study of individuals in context with 
their relationship to their roles and the climate and culture of the 
organization in order to discover patterns and indicators associated 
with individual-, team-, and organization-level performance [6,7]. 
Studies in sensemaking and active inference offer useful insights and 
frameworks for understanding how teams and their members 
communicate, parse, and integrate information to update prior models 
of the world and negotiate meaning to facilitate action [5,8–10]. The 
various domains that explore the nature and process of narrative 
construction, such as study of mythology and theology, narrative 
identity theory, psychoanalysis, and memetics reveal the more difficul t 
to quantify, emotional and intuition driven aspects of team 
performance, such as esprit de corps [5,11–14]. While IO psychology, 
sensemaking, and active inference provide nuanced lenses and 
frameworks for understanding team performance, the study of 
entrepreneurship and HROs provides meta-analysis of practical case 
studies to facilitate the identification of the key factors, best practices, 
and emergent strategies of both individuals and organizations that lead 
to peak performance and catastrophe [15].

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One such emergent strategy, independently discovered by HROs in 
varied domains, is the development of use-case specific “Operations 
Orders” (OPORDs) [4]. OPORDs are documents, with specified 
format, that clearly inform a team or organization of specific inte nded 
outcomes to be achieved and the information deemed necessary for the 
team to achieve these outcomes [16–18]. Use-case specific OPORDs 
are used in project management and business contexts, however, these 
OPORDs are subject to the same evolutionary pressure placed on all 
strategies used in high reliability environments [4]. The modern 
innovation and entrepreneurship environment, both pre- and post-
COVID-19, have new affordances and challenges that require new tools 
and adaptation of old ones. The experimental OPORD format, “The 
Facilitator's Catechism”, is an OPORD variation introduced during the 
COVID-19 pandemic to help emergent, remote teams maintain reliable 
performance in the absence of clear leadership, physical meetings, or 
formal organization [4]. However, this OPORD may be poorly fit to 
teams such as early-stage start-ups, fully remote innovation teams, and 
emergent hackathon teams, which have these traits but also the added 
pressure of communicating information and goals that are market -
related. Startup teams (and their stakeholders) are also involved in a 
collaborative mission that can be viewed as presenting the optimal 
product to the market, so organizational catechism-style OPORDs for 
startups need to have additional flexibility to adjust approach and have 
reduced need to plan for deep intra-team adversarial relationships.  
Below, the history and development of OPORDs are summarized and 
the perspectives offered from studies within the domains of IO 
psychology, sensemaking, active inference, and narrative construction 
will be used to discuss the basis for the impact of OPORDs on 
organizational performance. Then, some aspects of the historical and 
modern innovation and entrepreneurship environment will be discussed 
in contexts with the benefits and shortcomings of existing business and 
project management OPORD-like documents as well as the Facilitator’s 
Catechism. Finally, a new Facilitator’s Catechism variant, named the 
“Innovator’s Catechism”, will be introduced with affordances and 
adaptations that have the potential to impact innovation teams. 
Military Operations Orders  
Operations 
orders 
(OPORDs) 
are, 
traditionally, 
standardized 
documents that are used by national militaries to facilitate action (see 
Figure 1) [4,16,18]. Using clear format, compartmentalization, and 
codified ontology, OPORDs convey expectations of execution and 
allow organizations to rapidly align on common goals, approach, and

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mission-relevant details prior to engaging in military and non -military 
work [4]. 
The earliest historical instances of their usage and refinement are found 
during the Roman management of an expansive border with frontier 
territories occupied or bordered by recently conquered and fragmented 
peoples [4,19,20]. These conditions meant regular and rapidly 
developing incursions and insurrections, leading the Romans to develop 
protocol for reallocation of strategic assets and security against 
material sabotage which came in the form of OPORD variants such as 
service orders for the delivery of supplies and request of 
reinforcements and sentry orders for managing access to military camps 
[4,21,22]. This idea of specialization of OPORD by department or type 
of mission, will return in a later section on OPORDs in businesses. 
Where sentry orders facilitated explicit process and auditability for 
reliable physical security of supplies [4], service orders allowed the 
Roman Army to maintain operational reach despite notable asymmetry 
between the size and threats of the frontier and the available resources 
at the Army’s disposal [4,19,21]. Emphasizing the importance of these 
service orders in the Roman Military, there is substantial evidence that 
Rome’s famed road system was not built or used extensively for 
commercial purposes [21], but instead for maintaining what is referred 
to in U.S. Military Doctrine as “Economy of Force”, or the effective 
Figure 1.    Israeli OPORD Format as of 1988, adapted from [18]

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allocation of military assets and the minimization of the cost of their 
deployment through well informed logistics [21,23,24].  
The next notable developments came in the 19th Century, where the 
new affordance of inexpensive paper offered European armies the 
freedom to experiment with new OPORD format and practice while an 
increased emphasis on standing, professional armies and readiness, 
military-bureaucracy reforms, and more reliable logistics meant that 
militaries had the structural changes needed to allow them to mobilize, 
deploy, and pivot in the field faster, farther, and with  less warning than 
ever before [4,24–31]. The French Armies of the Republic began to 
develop OPORDs that were many pages long, precisely detailing every 
action that the unit should perform, however, the mechanical, linear 
nature of the OPORDs was inconsistent with the nonlinearity of the 
battlespace, and historical records suggest that these detailed orders 
were rarely carried out and that the practices surrounding them did not 
propagate [4,32]. Where the French had long, complicated OPORDs, 
the Prussians, as a result of their embrace of the philosophy and 
practice of “Auftragstaktik”, or “Mission-Type Tactics”, developed by 
Prussian generals von Clausewitz and Griepenkerl and the chief of staff 
of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, saw the emergence of 
OPORDs that “no longer optimized for detail or technique, but instead 
for mission, narrative clarity, and minimum time for issuance” 
[4,18,26].  
These OPORDs acknowledged the famed insights of Clausewitz and 
von Moltke: “war is the realm of uncertainty” [24] and “no plan of 
operations survives the first collision with the main body of the enemy” 
[29], respectively. These OPORDs were reflections of the type of field 
orders von Moltke issued during his campaigns, clearly preferring 
general directives with guidance rather than strict orders, which earned 
him criticism but proved effective in the unexpected situations that 
required increased flexibility [29]. The Prussians believed that the 
increased fluidity in combat meant that commanders would have to rely 
on communication of objectives and trust in their officers to act 
independently in pursuit of those objectives in the field [4,32,33].  
The emergence and impact of these formats, and of the underlying 
military philosophy from which they were developed, inspi red a U.S. 
Cavalry General, Eben Swift, to establish the first instance of a strongly 
codified “field order” format for OPORDs in 1897 [4,16,32,34]. Swift, 
who had previously served in the American West fighting the Sioux, 
Cheyenne, Barrock, and Ute tribes [35–37], in operations that have 
elements resembling the aforementioned Roman management of 
frontier territories [4,19,38,39], developed this OPORD format, now

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called the “Five Paragraph Order” (5PO), to facilitate the practice of 
“Auftragstaktik” in the field [4,16,18,32,34]. The 5PO prioritized the 
provision of the information necessary to “enable the subordinates to 
carry out the operations [at] hand” [18], and clear communication of 
the commander’s “intimation of the end” [18]—what it was that the 
commander wanted to accomplish, rather than how they wanted it 
accomplished [4,18,32].  
The 5PO was just one of many significant contributions made by Swift. 
In the domain of military pedagogy, Swift introduced the “applicatory 
method” of instruction at the Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, 
which included “tactical decision games” (TDGs) [40] and regular in -
the-field exercises [34,37]. In the domain of operations planning, Swift 
created the “Military Decision Making Process” (MDMP, see Figure 2) 
[40,41] which was a novel checklist and process-oriented approach to 
decision making which could be rendered on a matrix, placing elements 
of the OPORD in relationship to the progression of the operation, from 
planning to execution [40]. All of Swift’s notable cont ributions fit a 
common theme: adapting the U.S. Military’s Officer Corps to a 
changing environment, one which favored guerilla tactics, flexibility, 
and adaptation in response to rapidly changing circumstances, 
rendering traditional expectations of balance of power obsolete [42–
44]. Swift would later take the principles and practices that he 
formulated and taught at Leavenworth and refine them in the field 
during WWI and in some of the first notable unconventional conflicts 
and counterinsurgencies of the 20th Century, such as the Punitive 
Campaign and the Moro Rebellion [34,35]. The environment that Swift 
was preparing the U.S. Military for became the norm in the coming 
decades [44–46]. The 5PO was adopted and adapted by other national 
governments [4] and use-case specific variants of the OPORD emerged, 
such as WWI trench-to-trench attack orders [47], or WWII attack, 
defend, and development orders [18,48]. 
A tracking of the history of changes to OPORDs indicates that 
mechanisms, sections, and priorities of their format change in response 
to new affordances, change in the structural complexity of the 
organization and its environment, and increases to the fluidity of the 
battlespace [4,16,26]. Changes to affordances available to militaries 
may include available infrastructure or equipment such as roads [21] or 
communications systems [50] but also changes to the mediums available 
for the issuing and writing OPORDs themselves, such as the availability 
of “tessera” tablets to the Roman Army [22], the availability of  paper 
for the 19th century armies [4], or digital affordances in modern joint 
operations [51–53], all of which resulted in new emerging practices 
related to OPORD format and culture [4]. Changes to OPORD

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structural complexity include expanding layers of b ureaucracy [45] and 
introduction of doctrine [54] such as the 19th century Prussian and 
French military reforms influenced by Carl von Clausewitz and Henri 
Antoine Jomini [30], joint operations [55,56] such as those between 
American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the French Army, and the 
British Army during World War I [4,45,47,57], and adaptations to 
physical changes to the battlespace itself such as the introduction of 
trench and jungle warfare [4,47,58]. Changes to affordances and 
structural complexity certainly catalyzed OPORD experimentation, 
however, changes to structural complexity often cause changes to the 
fluidity of the battlespace, or the freedom with which Centers of 
Gravity (COGs), the “strategic centers of friendly and adversary 
strength, power, and resistance” [56,59], in the battlespace may shift, 
and increased fluidity of Centers of Gravity have provided the 
evolutionary 
pressure 
necessary 
to 
encourage 
the 
usage 
and 
development of new affordances [4].  
However, for all the experimentation and the changes that were made 
to OPORDs in the 20th Century, all “adhered closely” to Swift’s 
original format (see Figure 3) [16]. Further, virtually all  military 
OPORDs identified by meta-analyses from Fort Leavenworth during 
Figure 2.    Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) Matrix, adapted from [49]

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the Cold War appear to cohere to the requirement that the following 
items be addressed: 
1. What the commander issuing the order wanted to accomplish.  
2. What limiting or controlling factors must be observed. 
3. What resources and support have been allotted. [4,16,18]  
Figure 3.    Comparison of OPORDs [4]

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Impact on Organizations  
Here we consider the functional features of OPORDs (high reliability, 
fault tolerance, goal-seeking) in terms of how they are deployed in High 
Reliability Organizations (HROs) and other complex systems in nature 
that consist of a massive number of interacting subunits. HROs such 
as militaries, are organizations that are characterized by their 
interactions with Complex Threat Surfaces, or threat surfaces which 
produce non-linear impact if exploited and require non-linear or 
adaptive defenses [44]. HROs earn their name from maintaining reliable 
performance and resilience in environments where small errors can 
create cascading effects and catastrophe [15,60–65]. Given the nature 
of the environments HROs operate in, there is pressure on these 
organizations to adapt and develop best practices for handling the 
myriad of external and internal threats to reliable performance, 
consequently, they are frequently used as the subject of case studies 
done in the interest of making these best practices accessible to other 
organizations [15,60–68]. HROs often converge on the same best 
practices independently when adapting to environments with similar 
threats and pressures [15,44], thus it is not coincidence that modern 
OPORDs appear to cohere to similar standards. 
All reflexive systems, at the scale of both organisms and organizations, 
require ongoing recalibration to survive and thrive. HROs must make 
these recalibrations consciously [15] and at a rapid pace with limited 
information in order to update processes and technology to maintain 
reliable performance [5]. In this cybernetic framing, OPORDs help 
HROs navigate several interconnected key areas of tradeoff, common 
to all reflexive systems, to facilitate successful action amidst 
uncertainty. 
E x p l o r e - E x p l o i t  
“Explore-Exploit” [69,70] refers to the axis of strategic 
variation related to the adventurousness of the system. 
Exploratory behavior, or global search, is a broad search 
through functional and non-functional regimes. Exploitative 
behavior, or local optimization, is a more narrow search mode 
based upon the incremental improvement afforded by 
considering system states close to the current solution. The 
statistical regularities of the ecosystem and niche are what 
dictate the success, literally the fitness of a given optimization 
process [71]. At the scale of the individual, this tradeoff can be 
anecdotally described as: “sticking with an old favorite ensures 
a good meal, but if you are willing to explore you might discover

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something better” [72]. At the scale of the organization, failing 
to allow experimentation and ingenuity in order to optimize 
exploitation based on current understanding of system state will 
leave operations fragile and stagnant in changing environments 
[15] whereas allowing too much freedom to explore may result 
in “misadventure” [4]. Approaches such as cybernetics & active 
inference seek to finesse the explore-exploit tradeoff space 
through informed action and experimentation [70,73]. As the 
dimensionality and ruggedness of the performance landscape 
increases, deep or generative methods become increasingly 
important [74]. OPORDs help organizations balance this 
tradeoff by allowing for rapid alignment on clear goals and 
situational details, which expedites sensemaking and provides a 
constraint on exploitation (objective) that acts as a constraint 
on exploration (situation and approach) [4]. 
L e a r n - P e r f o r m  
Information-processing systems must be able to learn and 
rapidly adapt their models of the world in response to real time 
observations, and then reliably perform work and act based on 
these 
models. 
Pedagogical 
literature 
informing 
IO 
psychologists and educators defines learning as the changes to 
cognitive structure [75,76], and performance as the measurable 
outputs of behavior relevant to the system of interest [75,77]. 
Optimization of the learning processes do not necessarily 
increase in performance metrics and significant changes in 
performance do not necessarily create learning outcomes [75], 
creating a learn-perform trade-off for systems to manage. 
OPORDs provide constraints for learning in the same fashion 
that they do for exploration, by providing performance 
requirements as a constraint on operations, but they also 
provide opportunities to bridge the gap between learning and 
performance by providing a tool for post-mortem analysis [4]. 
If the OPORD clearly defines the goals and performance 
outcomes, then it can be used in post-operation analysis to 
inform learning that is tied directly to performance. 
T o p  D o w n - B o t t o m  U p  
Topologically, distributed systems can have a centralized “hub-
and-spoke” structure, a small world architecture with both local 
and global connections, a sparse or dense local connective 
structure, or other types of patterns. Multiple kinds of 
descriptors for static and temporal graphs exist, capturing

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different aspects of their structure such as the connectedness 
distribution, PageRank, and semantic similarity [78,79]. 
Commonly described in graphical settings is a system’s patterns 
of “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” information processing and 
decision-making. “Top-down” can refer to information and 
directives that descend through a managerial hierarchy, or from 
more abstract areas of cognition into more concrete 
realizations. “Bottom-up” can refer to systemic changes that 
are driven by inputs and adjustments from the smallest or most 
numerous sub-component of a system, for example ant 
nestmates in the colony or cells in the brain. Collective 
behavior refers to the properties of interacting system subunits, 
accounting for the networks of influences that shape group 
outcomes [80,81]. Collective behavioral systems need to 
integrate top-down and bottom-up information streams in 
order to succeed (e.g. not rely too heavily on sensory input nor 
on preconceptions about the world).  
Historically, OPORDs in the military have not provided 
bottom-up flexibility due to the limited ability to communicate 
rapidly [4,82]. With the advent of remote and asynchronous 
communication, OPORDs have emerged in the gray-zone 
between military and civilian domains that provide some 
freedom from strict hierarchical control, such as the Heilmeier 
Catechism—where the parent organization (Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency, DARPA) gives general guidance on 
a problem and some situational details and the sub-organization 
(the research team) writes the OPORD and sends it back to the 
parent organization for approval [4]. 
The active inference framework deals with how multiscale systems 
simultaneously enact policy while also updating their internal model of 
how policy decisions are related to future outcomes [5,83]. Thus active 
inference reframes and re-navigates some of the tradeoffs mentioned 
above, such as explore-exploit [73], learn-perform [74,84], and top-
down vs. bottom-up [85]. For example, by seeking to experiment in 
ways that optimally inform the organism, complex long-term policies 
can be implemented by agents with deep generative models of the world 
[74]. Active inference emphasizes the role of in-the-loop informative 
experimentation by system, as guided by their deep generative model. 
Under active inference, systems act not to maximize their estimated 
reward at current or future timepoints, but rather engage in 
sensemaking and policy selection in order to optimally reduce 
surprising observations in the future—systems that fail to do this (e.g.

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systems that are continually surprised about key predictions) will soon 
cease to exist.  
As 
information-innovation 
ecosystems 
worldwide 
become 
exponentially more complicated and technical, forming teams require 
well-designed interventions and scaffoldings. Operation Orders 
(OPORDs) are one such intervention. This modern increase in 
operational complexity for startups and other small teams is enabled by 
access to online and remote collaborators, an affordance that milita ry 
and non-market-facing organizations have been optimizing for decades. 
Such organizations use OPORDs to communicate about proposed or 
mandated projects. Changes in technology are associated with changes 
in the norms and formats of OPORDs in military contexts [4], and 
arguably the same relationship between technological advances and 
logistical innovations exists in the business domain. To highlight 
domains of function interface between market-facing and non-market-
facing operations orders, below we trace the history, educational 
systems, and uses of the business operation order. 
Business Operations Orders  
Like any organization, a business needs to coordinate the activities of 
its various departments to ensure it reaches its desired goals. Most 
commonly the overarching goal of a commercial enterprise is to 
maximize shareholder value [86] but business organizations must also 
consider other aims as well (e.g. as a public-good corporation, 
hackathon, etc.). One of the earliest examples of detailed orders to a 
commercial enterprise is the instructions to the Virginia Colony from 
the Court of King James in 1606 [87]. The instructions accompanied 
the official charter that established the colony, which was more 
concerned with the size of the land grant and rights of the stockholders, 
including issues of governance and inheritance.  The instructions 
themselves included several practical details, such as selecting a site, 
dealing with inhabitants, and how to explore the country. For instance: 
“When you have discovered as far up the river as you mean to plant 
yourselves, and landed your victuals and munitions; to the end that every 
man may know his charge, you shall do well to divide your six score men 
into three parts; whereof one party of them you may appoint to fortifi e 
and build, of which your first work must be your storehouse for victuals; 
the other you may imploy in preparing your ground and sowing your corn 
and roots; the other ten of these forty you must leave as centinel at the 
haven's mouth. The other forty you may imploy for two months in 
discovery of the river above you, and on the country about you” (para 6)

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Unlike later military OPORDS, these instructions were not structured 
into a standard set of paragraphs. The business world would have to 
wait until the early 20th century to see some formalization start to arise 
in its approach to operational instructions. 
The first undergraduate degree in business was established at Wharton 
in 1881, followed later by the MBA program at Harvard in 1908 [88]. 
The advent of the railroad and telegraph had greatly expanded the size 
and scope of enterprises leading to the establishment of a managerial 
class to coordinate operations [89]. Business degrees were created to 
educate this new elite [90]. By 1920, Harvard had establishe d a required 
course in business policy in the second year of its MBA program 
focused on the problems faced by top managers [88].  Senior managers 
brought examples of problems they were facing to class, with students 
preparing recommendations, and the managers critiquing the proposals. 
Students were expected to generalize a set of approaches (or policies) 
from the examples presented. By 1951, the curriculum had morphed 
into a set of cases that focused on sizing up a situation, planning a 
program of action, organizing personnel and putting plans into action, 
and control/re-appraisal [88,91]. Scholars have attributed this 
development, in part, to exposure to military planning techniques 
during the Second World War [90] and there are clear parallels between 
the textbook process and military OPORDS, as well as between these 
developments and the development of the OPORD itself. 
The 1960s represented a golden age for the strategy industry. Business 
schools started teaching SWOT analysis, several seminal books on 
corporate strategy were published, a majority of corporations 
established strategic planning departments, strategy consulting firms 
were founded, and computer models were developed to optimize profits 
[90]. Corporations routinely forecasted financial outcomes up to twenty 
years into the future. The flaws of this approach were exposed during 
the oil crises of the early 1970s when oil prices soared along with 
inflation. Carefully crafted forecasts were thrown into disarray leading 
to a call to embrace uncertain futures through tools such as scenario 
planning [92]. Learning and adaptation became more important than 
predicting the future or creating inflexible plans [93]. Some even 
advocated eliminating uncertainty by actively seeking to shape the 
environment [94]. 
Mintzberg [93] has argued that strategic plans are a form of strategic 
programming that coordinate the various functions of the organization 
once a creative strategy (or vision or direction) has been selected. In 
his view, a staff of planners are structurally incapable of creating novel 
strategies as they are typically removed from the realities of the day -

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to-day business. “Formal procedures will never be able to forecast 
discontinuities, inform detached managers, or create novel strategies” 
(p. 111). However, once given a strategic direction, the planner-as-
programmer can develop the operational implications of the approach 
for the organization. 
Mintzberg [93] goes on to divide strategic programming into three 
components, codification, elaboration, and conversion: 
Codification means converting a broad vision into operational 
terms. For instance, a strategy to offer more online offerings 
lacks specificity for operational managers. Planners can break 
this down into specific objectives for various units such as 
growing online sales by 5% per annum or to 30% of total sales 
within 5 years. 
Elaboration means breaking down these objectives into the 
specific tasks and actions that must be undertaken to realize the 
objectives. For instance, warehouse space might need to grow 
to house online inventory. Some parts of the organization must 
be tasked with growing warehouse capacity and planners can 
outline the timing and resources required to do so. Elaboration 
is the task of providing action plans to organizational units and 
is most analogous to military OPORDS. 
Conversion means updating the organization’s policies and 
procedures to reflect the new strategic direction. For instance, 
an online strategy has implications for payment, shipping, and 
return policies that might be quite different from the policies 
in place for brick and mortar operations. Part of making a 
strategy ‘stick’ is to remove the frictions created by outdated or 
missing policies for a new situation. 
P l a n n i n g  f or  S t a r t u p s  
Startups, like other kinds of teams, can be formally p lanned or emerge 
informally in response to factors such as common threats, interests, 
and opportunities [5,14,44]. Forming startups are not just learning 
about a sector or skillset, they are also learning about each other as 
teammates, and about the team as a collective entity. Ontologies, 
Narratives, Formal documents, and Tools (ONFT, [5]) can be used as 
a basis for interventions and as a framework to model the process of 
team “forming, storming, norming, and performing” [95]. Successful 
startups are able to blend learning and performing (e.g. during a pivot, 
sprint, or hackathon/collabothon), suggesting that a valuable domain

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of research would be in understanding the interwoven dynamics of team 
development (learning) and productivity (performance).  
The startup community has not been immune to the fashions and fads 
of planning in the corporate environment. The Small Business 
Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 with the ability to issue or 
guarantee loans for small businesses. It is not clear when the S BA first 
required a business plan to be submitted with a loan application but it 
seems the practice was widespread by the 1960s [96]. As such, the 
requirement for a business plan mirrors the growth of formal planning 
techniques during the 1950s and 1960s. The current Code of Federal 
Regulations (13 CFR § 120.191) still requires applicants to provide a 
business plan for an SBA loan (see Appendix A for a business plan 
outline). 
Perhaps in response to this institutional pressure from the SBA, it 
became fashionable to require a business plan in other startup settings. 
Venture capitalists emerged in Silicon Valley in the 1960s and started 
requiring business plans [96]. As entrepreneurship courses started to 
gain in popularity in the 1980s, the business plan became a central 
feature of the program with 78% of business schools requiring a 
business plan as part of their entrepreneurship major by 2004 [97]. 
Textbooks also emphasized business plans, specialized business plan 
writing software emerged, and business plan competitions became 
popular. 
Unfortunately, there is very little evidence that having a (good) 
business plan improves the performance of a startup [97]. Although 
there is some evidence that a business plan assists in raising external 
funds, there is virtually no correlation between the quality/quantity of 
a plan and performance [98]. In fact, entrepreneurs report they rarely 
review or update their plans once they have been written and the 
majority of founders on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies 
report spending more time on informal than formal plans [99]. This 
aligns well with Mintzberg’s [93] insight that formal planning may, in 
fact, hinder strategy making and creativity rather than enhance it. 
The growing disenchantment with business plans led to a new 
movement in the startup community focused around business models 
rather than business plans. Every military strategist is familiar with von 
Moltke’s famous dictum that “no plan of operations exten ds with any 
certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” Steve 
Blank [100,101] paraphrased the statement for the startup community 
as “No business plan survives first contact with the customer.”

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Blank first started teaching customer development at UC Berkeley in 
Fall 2004, arguing that startups needed to “get out of the building” and 
test hypotheses about their assumptions with real customers. Blank’s 
work was amplified by developments in design thinking that encouraged 
entrepreneurs and innovators to empathize with customers through 
observation and interaction and then ideate on a range of possible 
solutions which could then be tested [102].      
Eric Ries, a student of Blank, later released The Lean Startup, which 
further popularized the approach by combining customer discovery 
with agile development principles [103,104]. The lean startup approach 
encouraged entrepreneurs to create a minimum viable product (MVP) 
that could generate revenue as fast as possible and then introduce new 
features over time (rather than the traditional approach of developing 
a fully-fledged product before launch). Entrepreneurs were encouraged 
to fail fast and ‘pivot’ away from approaches that were unpopular with 
customers before they ran out of cash (or ‘runway’).  
Around the same time, the first business model canvas was published 
[105]. A business model canvas replaces a 25-page business plan 
document with a single page that summarizes the overall plan in a series 
of categories placed in boxes on the page. The original Business Model 
Canvas (BMC) divided the page in nine categories: revenue streams, 
cost structure, value proposition, customer segments, customer 
relationships, channels, key activities, key partners, and key resources 
(see Appendix B).  Since 2010, a number of other canvases have been 
proposed including Maurya’s [106] Lean Canvas (see Appendix C). The 
Lean Canvas adds problem, solution, and unfair advantage to the mix 
by removing key partners, activities, and resources. In doing so, it 
challenges the entrepreneur to acknowledge existing solutions and how 
the startup intends to be better than the competition.  
Entrepreneurs are now encouraged by leading entrepreneurship 
educators to combine a business model canvas with the hypothesis 
testing approach of Blank [100] and Ries [103] to confirm assumptions 
in the business model. For instance, an entrepreneur might assume that 
customers are willing to pay $10 a month for a streaming subscription 
service. However, after demonstrating a prototype to a group of target 
customers, the feedback might suggest that $5 per month is a more 
realistic number. Drawing an analogy to science, the entrepreneur’s 
assumptions are like hypotheses that are tested through carefully -
designed experiments and analysis. In science, as in entrepreneurship, 
experiments should be designed to be informative and actionable, 
whether the results conform to or challenge prior expectations. 
Entrepreneurs test the biggest assumptions first then alter the BMC in

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response to customer (and other stakeholder) feedback.  The iterative 
approach ensures that entrepreneurs build products that people want 
and do not waste time building features and products that will flop 
once they hit the market. As such, Blank [101] describes a startup as “a 
temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable 
business model”. Scaling a company should only occur after a 
sustainable business model has been validated. 
Osterwalder and Blank have also extended the BMC to organizations 
that do not have revenue, such as government agencies in the defense 
and intelligence spaces [107]. In this case, revenue is replaced with 
mission achievement (or impact). Four other tweaks were also made: 
customer segments are changed to beneficiaries, cost structure is 
changed to mission cost/budget, channel is changed to deployment, 
and customer relationships are changed to buy-in/support. The 
resulting framework was christened the Mission Model Canvas (see 
Appendix D). The Mission Model Canvas is an example of the 
productive and bi-directional flow of organizational practices between 
market-facing and non-market sectors. 
The business model canvas enables an entrepreneur to communicate 
the general thrust of a new venture to a group of stakeholders in a 
consistent and parsimonious manner. Investors do not have to wade 
through pages and pages of prose that is often based on very little hard 
evidence. This frees up time to discuss the general viability of the 
offering and the assumptions underlying its success. As data is col lected 
and assumptions are updated then the canvas can also be easily 
modified in real time. Using the canvas to test a set of assumptions also 
makes everyone in the organization clear on the roadmap from launch 
to success (or failure).  
OPORDS are primarily about coordination. Innovation coordination is 
more important in a large organization than a startup (which might only 
comprise one team). However, even in a startup environment, there is 
still a need to coordinate actions with other stakeholders, parti cularly 
investors. The Business Canvas model is not usually prepared for 
external consumption. Additionally, there can be a tendency to use the 
Canvas a vision board or incoherent bricolage, rather than a strategic 
springboard. 
R e c e n t  T h i n k i n g  o n  I n n o v a t i o n  M o d e l s  
Current perspectives on entrepreneurship include several new topics 
that will be discussed here. Many of these changes to startup logic and 
practices have arisen due to technological advancement and changes in 
the innovation/market ecosystem. Fundamentally these approaches are

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all approaching startups with a lens of increased early integration and 
coherence. This need for an “Innovation Stack” was well-justified in a 
recent work by McKelvey: “The problem with solving one problem is 
that it usually creates a new problem that requires a new solution with 
its own new problems. This problem-solution-problem chain continues 
until eventually one of two things happens: either you fail to solve a 
problem and die, or you succeed in solving all the problems w ith a 
collection of both interlocking and independent innovation. This 
successful collection is what I call an Innovation Stack” [108].  
Recently 
Blank 
has 
promulgated 
an 
“Innovation 
Doctrine”, 
emphasizing clarity on areas such as context, leadership, inno vation 
pipeline, ambidexterity [109]. Blank’s development from the Business 
Canvas to the Innovation Doctrine can be seen as a movement upstream 
in the startup’s causal chain – a movement from scaffolding the 
semantic content and graphical layout of a 2D artifact, to augmenting 
the kind of doctrine or policy that a startup might adopt, regardless of 
their use of a canvas or other tooling.  
One integrative project in the space is the DLS Methodology (DLS 
being derived from combining Design thinking, Lean startup, and 
Scrum) [110]. Another more holistic modern approach to the startup 
process is the NABC (Needs, Approach, Benefits relative to cost, and 
Competition) model [111]. 
Gray Zone Operations Orders  
Today, Instantaneous Remote Teams find themselves in the gray zone 
between market facing and non-market facing domains. Recent 
developments to OPORD-like documents have occurred in the gray 
zone between market-facing and non-market-facing domains. George 
Heilmeier, while serving as the director of the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1970’s, introduced a 
“catechism” that has acted as a novel form of OPORD for research 
teams [4]. Catechisms are, traditionally, a set of questions with 
predefined answers that act as a basis to solidify religious narratives. 
Heilmeier’s innovation on the catechism was to allow teams to define 
their own answers to a set of questions related to the research they 
intended to pursue to generate an OPORD-like document that also 
acted as a “pre-flight safety checklist” prior to funding. The Heilmeier 
Catechism format allowed for established teams to distill their mission, 
situation, and approach in a standardized fashion and then present it 
to DARPA for approval. Additionally, this format changed the nature 
of OPORDs by allowing for bidirectional (bottom-up and top-down) 
informational propagation, by virtue of the call-and-response structure.

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The recently introduced Facilitator’s Catechism [4] builds on the 
Heilmeier Catechism in several key dimensions, taking advantage of 
modern affordances and recognizing contemporary challenges inherent 
to today’s informational ecosystem. Unlike the Heilmeier, the 
Facilitator’s Catechism does not assume fixed team composition or 
approach at the outset of the project. This flexibility is important f or 
all-online teams, teams with rapidly changing composition, and teams 
with AI actors. The Facilitator’s Catechism introduces the idea of 
versioning from computer code (e.g. GitHub), which allows the 
document repository to be a living single source of truth for the project 
and team. The Facilitator’s Catechism can also act as a call for 
collaborators. The Facilitator’s Catechism was written with research - 
or deliverable-based teams in mind, working in areas that are indirectly 
market-facing (e.g. grant-funded research). The Heilmeier Catechism 
introduced a new informational affordance by improving the interface 
between project funders and proposed research projects. The 
Facilitator’s Catechism builds on this catechism-mediated interfacing 
of people, projects, and funding with an eye towards unconventional 
and rapidly formed teams (e.g. during emergencies or hackathons). 
T h e  F u t u r e  o f  B u s i n e s s  O P O R D s  –  W h a t  i s  s t i l l  n e e d e d :  
As noted, development in Business OPORDs is oriented towards 
increasing clarity and success in uncertain or changing contexts. There 
are several areas, listed here, where current business OPORDs might 
be made more effective or flexible, drawing from emerging and best 
practices in HROs, global innovation, and instantaneous online teams.  
Notably, there are complementary sets of insights into OPORD design 
that come from market-facing (business) and non-market-facing (e.g. 
military) perspective. Across situations and sectors, teams must as sess 
their situation and find successful policies of experimentation, so a 
variety of practices have converged on asking about the essential 
features of a team’s situation. Figure 4 shows the interfacing of a 
market-facing OPORD-like document (left side, Lean Canvas) and non-
market-facing OPORD (right side, Facilitator’s Catechism) via shared 
areas of focus (center column). This alignability across OPORD 
formats will return later in the advanced rendering capacities of the 
Innovator’s Catechism.

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Currently, organizations are looking across dimensions and sectors to 
find emerging and successful practices related to innovation, especially 
in the global and online settings. Small organizations (such as 
hackathon teams, or startups) are finding value in using computational 
tools of the kind that larger organizations use as well (e.g. GitHub, 
CRMs, Cloud services), which facilitates scaling and onboarding. Large 
organizations of all kinds are looking to small, creative teams within 
and outside of their ranks (e.g. freelancing, citizen science, working 
groups) to produce innovation. In the modern entrepreneurship 
ecosystem, as described above, the trend has been towards increased 
early-stage systematization, integration across domains and through 
time, and emphasis on clarity of mission. With all these recent advances 
in mind, and an eye towards the subsequent introduction of the 
Innovator’s Catechism, we list several areas in which business OPORDs 
could be further improved: 
1. There is no reason that Agile techniques can’t be applied to the 
design and testing phases (not just the build phase). Sprint plans 
are OPORDS. They are also examples of a time pacing strategy 
[112]. The pacing and rhythm of business OPORDs is similar to 
operational tempo in military settings. 
Figure 4.    Affordances of the Lean Canvas and Facilitator’s Catechism

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2. Versioning systems, usually used to share and annotate code, 
could help emergent teams build documentation from the 
beginning of their collaboration,  
3. Advanced rendering capacities for reconfigurable visualization 
could reduce “work about work” by facilitating the rapid 
preparation of pitch documents, slides, and canvas models.  
4. Different renderings (e.g. slides, canvas) of formal documents 
could be useful to build Rules of Engagement (pre-authorized 
actions) on hiring, spending etc., maintain values and mission 
documents.  
5. When 
OPORD 
frameworks 
are 
ill-defined 
or 
contain 
spurious/abstract questions, teams can spend too much time on 
informal preparation/polishing, and not enough time on the 
project/development itself.  
6. Complexity motivates novel approaches to entrepreneurship 
[113–115]. emergent startup and the landscape of affordances of 
different kinds.  
7. While “get good feedback & do the most informative 
experiment” is often given as qualitative advice, this principle is 
not formally integrated into Business OPORD or presentation 
formats. This notion of optimal experimentation could be 
developed using active inference, a multiscale Bayesian 
framework for action, learning, and development [5,116]. 
The Innovator’s Catechism 
Here we present the “Innovator’s Catechism” (IC). The conception of 
the IC began with the question: “What would need to be adapted within 
or added to the Facilitator’s Catechism to make it more useful to early-
stage teams in hackathons, working groups, short -term committees, 
citizen science incubators, and similar groups?” The IC was then 
constructed by considering both the value offered by the Catechism -
styled OPORD, “The Facilitator’s Catechism” [4], to organizations 
while expanding and improving upon previous approaches to systematic 
improvement of start-up processes and organizational performance in 
general to acknowledge the unique requirements and limitations of the 
early-stage innovation and entrepreneurship teams, allowing for its use 
to reduce “work-about-work” [117] and increase likelihood of success, 
especially where: 
1. The team will need to rapidly render information about their 
objectives and approach to a variety of formats to communicate

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23 
 
to external or parent organizations prior to work or in order to 
secure resources or provide situational awareness at various 
stages of their development. 
2. The information requirements and limitations at different stages 
of progress vary greatly, creating situations where no single, 
traditional OPORD would be appropriate at every stage. 
3. Team and project success are market-facing (as opposed to the 
non-market-facing team settings considered by the initial version 
of the Facilitator’s Catechism). 
The IC has affinity on several dimensions with OPORDs in the military 
and high-reliability space, as well as direct mappings to the state-of-
the-art practices in entrepreneurship, and uses the same sections as the 
Facilitator’s Catechism: (a) Header, (b) Situation, (c) Missio n, (d) 
Potential Avenues of Approach, (e) Milestones, (f) Administration, 
Logistics and Signal, and (g) Footer with one exception, as Implications 
of Outcome has been replaced with Cost and Benefit. However, the IC 
is unique among OPORDs in that its questions and format are 
dependent on the team’s position in an innovation pipeline, creating 
what could be considered a “family” of catechisms in which new 
questions are added and old ones are updated or expanded upon as the 
team progresses through each stage. At each stage, the questions asked 
of the team are only the ones that provide the key pieces of information 
necessary to ensure success and communicate status given the nature 
of the current objectives and best practices (see Figure 5). For example, 
at the Ideation stage, a team should not prioritize considering a revenue 
model, but at the Pitch stage, a team that has not yet considered a 
revenue model should not be pitching. The information points 
produced by the questions also serve to align the team, pro vide 
constraints to prevent failure, and can be rendered to numerous 
formats. Below, the Innovator’s Catechism is detailed by stage, with 
Header and Footer discussed separately, as they remain unchanged 
throughout.

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The Header section of the IC is included at the very top of the 
document, providing a section for key details about the project 
that should be immediately available to any interested party 
(Project Name, Team Name, Person(s) Responsible, Contact 
Information, Start Date, etc.). The Header section of the IC 
includes key elements from the Facilitator’s Catechism but 
rejects others. For example, due to the nature of an 
entrepreneurial team and the expectations of continuity, “Date 
of Completion” and “Call for Collaboration End Date” are 
removed, as is the recommended “Project Callsign”. A Team 
Name might be the company name, but even if the team is 
emergent, creating a team name separate from the task at hand 
provides an anchor for development of organizational culture 
and 
“esprit 
de 
corps” 
[5,12,118–120]. 
The 
“Date 
of 
Figure 5.    Information Requirements by Stage

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25 
 
Announcement”, which is a more useful wording for the kinds 
of research projects for which the Facilitator’s Catechism was 
created for, is rephrased as a more general “Start Date” to 
provide an initial start date for the current stage as well as give 
context for expectations of current progress. 
The Footer is included at the bottom of each page and it is 
recommended that it provide the current version of the IC 
format in use, preferably with a hyperlink to the repository 
where the version specification is held. In addition, if the 
document is going to be shared outside the context of a 
framework that provides versioning details, such as GitHub, it 
is recommended that the footer also contain a note regarding 
the current version of the team’s IC with an embedded 
hyperlink to where other versions are held. 
Stages 
In the context of the Innovation pipeline [121], we can partition the 
startup’s journey as occurring through a sequence of stages:  
1. Ideation 
2. Curation 
3. Pitch 
4. Exploration 
5. Incubation 
6. Integration 
The pipeline is the representation of the ideal journey from the early -
stage recognition of a problem, to the integration of a solution to that 
problem into the market—or, in the case of non-entrepreneurial 
innovation teams, integration into the organization. Each stage is 
represented by its own clear mission, best practices, and information 
requirements, all of which are meant to lead to outcomes that carry the 
team to the next stage (see Figure 6).

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26 
 
Ideation Stage 
At the Ideation Stage, a group has formed around the acknowledgement 
of a common problem. Regardless of context, the mission is simple: 
generate a potential innovative solution to this problem. In order to do 
this successfully, they must clearly define the problem and who it 
affects, as well as choose an approach with constraints in order to 
increase the likelihood of success. Approaches revolve around deep 
questioning related to the problem through methods such as 
empathizing and narration, placing the team in the shoes of the users, 
as well as mind and flow mapping, allowing the team to make the 
problem observable. The IC at this stage asks few questions, only what 
is necessary to begin Ideation and inform potentially interested parties 
as to what is being pursued, who is responsible for the project, who the 
stakeholders are, and how to contact the team (see Figure 7).  
C u r a t i o n  S t a g e  
The team enters the Curation Stage after it has successfully defined a 
problem, identified the groups of people it affects, and converged on a 
potential innovative solution. The mission is now to demonstrate the 
novelty of and need for this solution. At this stage, best practices 
include approaches like market research and surveys, competitor 
analysis, and use-case development, consequently, this stage has more 
information requirements than ideation. Prior to engaging in work, it's 
important that the team understand the potential costs for the 
approaches they choose, such as purchasing research tools or 
commercial intelligence products, and decide on clear milestones to 
prevent mission or scope creep. The Catechism now adds additional 
questions and asks for updates to those previously answered, as during 
this process the definition of the problem or the groups it may affect 
Figure 6.    Innovation Pipeline Matrix

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27 
 
may have changed. Given that the approaches now become more 
complex and may take longer periods of time to achieve, the IC now 
asks for the key milestones that best indicate progress. For these same 
reasons and the potential for approaches that require a budget, the IC 
also asks for what resources may be necessary to commit to this work 
and the expected costs. 
P i t c h  S t a g e 
At the Pitch stage, the team is now mature enough to define the mission 
that will carry it through the remaining stages: providing the value of 
the solution they developed during the Ideation stage and demonstrated 
the novelty and need for in the Curation stage, consequentl y, its 
primary objective is now to communicate this mission and acquire the 
resources necessary to pursue it. The team now needs to prepare to 
present its intents to external parties, in a collaborative setting (e.g. 
hackathon, incubator, or startup-weekend) the team may need to 
present their potential project to judges or the community, innovation 
teams within organizations will need to get support and a budget to 
continue, and start-ups have to acquire funding. This is a stage that any 
team may need to return to again and again on their journey toward 
successful integration.  
The information requirements at this stage grow rapidly, and the IC 
now includes all questions (see Figure 7). In addition to all of the 
questions the IC asks in prior stages, the team must use what it has 
learned from the Curation stage to define the alternative solutions 
available, as well as the potential early adopters and the channels over 
which they will be reached. The team must also define the approach to 
their evolved mission, the provision of the solution they envisioned, 
rather than the approach to acquiring funding—to this end, they are 
asked to define the advantages and risks offered by the approach and 
the feasibility of success. In addition to milestones, they are now als o 
asked for the metrics that would help measure impact of their solution 
and the success of the mission. The team now needs to update costs to 
include the costs associated with the provision of the solution (e.g. cost 
per user) and add the benefits the provision of the solution might 
provide (e.g. revenue, cost reduction). Finally, they are now also asked 
to provide the big picture, if the team were successful and the solution 
impactful, what would this mean? (e.g. an Airbnb for events, a YouTube 
specifically for cooking, this privacy solution for Government 
employees could also be useful in civilian markets).

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The IC has the potential to offer a great deal of value to teams a t this 
stage, contributing to informal and formal pitches in several ways. 
First, the IC can be rapidly rendered to the large variety of formats 
(e.g. canvas variants, Heilmeier Catechism, NABC) asked for by 
different organizations and the team may need to present to a large 
variety of organizations (see Figures 8 and 9, and Appendices E and F). 
Second, it allows the team to maintain fully-documented traces of their 
development as ICs’ are versioned at different stages and filled out 
entering new stages, allowing the team to inform any presentations they 
create with a story. Third, it can act as a presentation document itself, 
as a stand-alone brief. Fourth, building on these other value-adds, it 
can be used to quickly create slide decks that include any of the helpful 
Figure 7.    All Questions of The Innovator’s Catechism

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29 
 
formats or use the questions as the narrative structure for their slides 
(see Appendix G). Lastly, it can be used to generate a straight -forward 
elevator pitch, brief, or abstract that communicates a straightforward 
narrative: 
“These problems are being experienced by these users, and these 
alternatives aren’t adequately addressing their needs. Our mission 
is to provide this value to these users using this approach that (we 
have this advantage in providing)/(provides this advantage). It is 
feasible that we will succeed using this approach for these reasons, 
despite these costs, and these risks. Necessary to pursuing this 
mission are these resources, of which we still require: [needed 
resources]. Using this approach this group would likely be early 
adopters and we’d introduce them to the value we’re providing using 
these channels. These metrics would be used to monitor the impact 
and these milestones would best indicate progress. These are the 
stakeholders. This person is responsible for the project. This is 
how you contact the team. More information is available here.” 
Figure 8.    IC Rendering to Various Formats

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Figure 9.    Innovator's Catechism Example Rendering to NABC

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A f t e r  t h e  P i t c h :  E x p l o r a t i o n ,  I n c u b a t i o n ,  a n d  I n t e g r a t i o n  
S t a g e s  
The IC beyond the pitch adds no new questions or changes to format. 
Teams that have succeeded in progressing beyond the pitch will likely 
have to return it often and are now mature enough to exercise maximum 
freedom of choice. The “missions'' of each stage beyond the pitch can 
now be reflected in the IC as milestones in pursuit of their larger 
mission. The team can now optimize function and update the IC 
accordingly so that when the next opportunity or requirement to return 
to the Pitch stage arises, they can rapidly communicate their current 
position, track record, and all other relevant information in the format 
required while reducing work-about-work—allowing them to focus on 
the mission itself. 
Discussion 
In this paper, we have reviewed the history, development, and impact 
of Operations Orders (ORORDs) in the context of state militaries, 
high-reliability organizations, and entrepreneurship and presented a 
modified Facilitators Catechism [4] that is specialized for early-stage 
innovation teams: The Innovator’s Catechism (IC). 
The IC has several features that distinguish it from alternative 
approaches for facilitating development in early-stage startups:  
1. Catechism Format. Without clarity of mission, approach, and 
needs, an early startup may bear an unneeded risk of failure. The 
document ensures that the team has a clear single source of truth 
to align on and the questions lend themselves to prompting 
group discussion that has clear deliverables. The Question-and-
Answer format of the Catechism also reduces the need for the 
supplementary material to ensure that it is being filled out 
correctly.  
2. Narrative Development. The structure of the family of 
Innovator’s Catechisms (see Figure 7) allows the team and 
external parties to consider the relevant dimensions of a business 
approach in the context of a developing narrative. In addition, 
stage-formalization with clear information requirements for 
progression 
clearly 
marks 
progress, 
giving 
the team 
a  
compressible and easily communicated history. 
3. Versioning. Versioning helps the team have a history and 
identity. It can help when later assigning ownership, assessing 
reproducibility, and performing statistical analysis of team

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performance across settings. Versioning with a common format 
allows evaluation of team performance and development through 
time.  
4. Modularity. The digital and structured input IC also allows for 
fluid reformatting into multiple formats (see Figures 8 and 9). 
This fluid reformatting allows for the rapid production of 
customizable presentations in a variety of formats such as 
canvases and slide decks (see Appendices E, F, and G) as well as 
to the Heilmeier and Facilitator’s Catechism formats. This 
modular format also enables clear comparability between teams 
using the IC and between the team’s expectations and later 
performance—offering clarity in post-mortem analysis. 
These features of the IC, among others, have the potential to increase 
the efficacy of early-stage innovation teams by allowing the team to 
quickly communicate its ideas both internally and externally and focus 
on performance and process. The IC acts as the “pre-flight safety 
checklist” that Heilmeier prescribed, increasing the likelihood of 
success while also increasing the speed at which teams that are unlikely 
to succeed disintegrate by forcing them to reckon with the information 
requirements commensurate with their current stage of development 
[4]. The IC specification presented (Appendices H, I, and J) will be 
hosted using a GitHub repository to allow for new variants to be 
tracked and versioned under a flexible license. It is recommended that 
the IC be used in hackathons, research accelerators, incubators, and 
other innovation related events and initiatives to greatly i ncrease the 
observability, comparability, and likelihood of success of the work 
being performed. The design space of approaches for catalyzing 
healthy, productive, innovative online teams is vast, and the 
Innovator’s Catechism is a first attempt at a catechism-styled OPORD 
specific to use-cases in this area.

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Appendices 
 
Appendix A . Business P lan Outline [122]  
 
Appendix B. Business Model Canvas [123]  
File available at https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas

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Appendix C. Lean Canvas  [124]  
F i l e  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / l e a n s t a c k . c o m / l e a n c a n v a s  
 
Appendix D. Mission Model Canvas [125]  
F i l e  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / w w w . s t r a t e g y z e r . c o m / b l o g / p o s t s / 2 0 1 6 / 2 / 2 4 /  
t h e - m i s s i o n - m o d e l - c a n v a s - a n - a d a p t e d - b u s i n e s s - m o d e l - c a n v a s - f o r - m i  
s s i o n - d r i v e n - o r g a n i z a t i o n s

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Appendix E. IC to Lean Canvas Rendering  adapted 
from [124]

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Appendix F. IC to Collaborative Innovation Canvas 
Rendering  adapted from [126]

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Appendix G. IC to Kawasaki’s “Only Ten Slides” 
Framework adapted from [127]

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Appendix H. Innovator’s Catechism – Ideation 
F i l e  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / g i t h u b . c o m / C O G S E C / I n n o v a t o r s C a t e c h i s m

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Appendix I. Innovator’s Catechism – Curation 
F i l e  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / g i t h u b . c o m / C O G S E C / I n n o v a t o r s C a t e c h i s m

## Page 51

The Innovator’s Catechism, 2020 
 
51 
 
Appendix J. Innovator’s Catechism – P itch 
F i l e  a v a i l a b l e  a t  h t t p s : / / g i t h u b . c o m / C O G S E C / I n n o v a t o r s C a t e c h i s m


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*Extraction method: pymupdf*