Skillforests Method Guide
The Skillforests method — concepts, structures, and the practices built on them. Draft generated from the method repo.
The Skillforests method
What Skillforests is
Skillforests is a way of managing skills that borrows its best idea from video games: the skill t...
Where it comes from
In early 2020, the question was simple: professional competencies relate to each other in complex...
The problems it solves
Most organisations manage skills through a fog. The information exists — in people's heads, scatt...
How to read this book
The book has two parts, and the split is deliberate. Part I (chapters 1–6) is the shared foundati...
Skills
The skill as building block
Everything in a forest is made of skills. A skill is one concrete ability: something you can do, ...
Prerequisites
A prerequisite is a skill you need before another skill becomes learnable. You can't write media ...
Two kinds of skill
Every skill in a forest is one of exactly two kinds. The split answers a simple question: is ther...
The three levels
The three levels are the load-bearing definitions of the whole method — everything from self-asse...
Granularity — how big is a skill?
Cut skills too big and people stall on them for a year; too small and the forest becomes confetti...
Trees
Trees as areas of knowledge
A tree is a scope of view over a connected group of skills — an area of knowledge that forms a lo...
How trees connect inside
Inside a tree, the prerequisite chains from the skills page become visible paths. Arrows run from...
Roots are derived, not added
Every tree has roots — the skills you must already hold before you can enter the tree. And here's...
Forests and ranks
The forest
A forest is a group of trees — the full scope of knowledge for a single role. "Front End Develope...
Ranks
A forest maps a role's knowledge; ranks map the journey through it. A rank is a seniority level —...
Roles that share skills
Skills are defined once, organisation-wide — and roles overlap. A front-end developer and a desig...
When roles don't fit
Some teams are too varied for fixed ladders. A small agency where everyone wears three hats, a re...
Honest assessment
Placing a person on the levels
The method lives or dies on honest assessment — and the levels are built to make honesty achievab...
Failure modes
Every assessment source has a bias signature. Knowing them is most of the defence — and it's why ...
Validation at scale
Assessing a handful of people honestly is a discipline. Assessing fifty — while levels feed revie...
Keeping the forest alive
The review cadence
A forest is a living map, and living things need tending. The method runs on two nested rhythms —...
What a forest review changes
A forest review is gardening, and it makes exactly three kinds of change. Walking in knowing this...
Consistency without flattening
The moment more than one team runs forests, a tension appears. The organisation wants consistency...
Growing your own skills
Reading your forest
Your role is a forest; this chapter is about walking it. First, learn to read the map from where ...
Choosing a path
The forest shows every possible path. Yours needs choosing — and five principles do most of the c...
Tracking your progress
A map only helps if it stays current. So the real question of this page isn't whether to track — ...
Pitfalls
Five ways people trip on their own forest — all avoidable once named. 1. Trying to learn everythi...
Growing a team
The team map
Point a forest at a team and it becomes something new: one picture of what the team can actually ...
Planning growth
A team's development plan shouldn't need inventing — the map, read against the future, mostly wri...
Hiring against the forest
Most job openings are written from memory and vibes — a list of technologies, some adjectives, "5...
Reviews and 1:1s on levels
Reviews are where the forest pays for itself most visibly — because it replaces the worst part of...
Developing the team
The map shows what to grow; these are the mechanisms that do the growing — and the guardrail that...
Growing people
Onboarding a person
Coaching with a forest starts the same way every time: four steps that turn "help me grow" into a...
Guiding progress
Onboarding drew the route; guiding is keeping the person moving along it. Four practices carry th...
Coaching many people
Coach one person and the forest is a map. Coach many, and it becomes something better: a dataset....
Skill management across the organisation
Roles and ranks as one system
Every role has a forest; every forest has ranks; every person holds skills at levels. Run across ...
Ranks, evaluation, and pay
Connecting the forest to evaluation — and eventually money — is where the method carries the most...
Reporting and planning
With every team's forest speaking the same vocabulary, the organisation gains four reads that use...
Rolling it out
The org-wide system of the previous pages is the destination. Nobody should start there. Skillfor...