Skills

The skill as building block

Everything in a forest is made of skills. A skill is one concrete ability: something you can do, demonstrate, and — crucially — name precisely.

Precision is the whole game. "I know marketing" tells you nothing; it's a continent, not a skill. But break it down and suddenly you have a plan:

That's the test of a well-cut skill: you can honestly say whether you hold it, and at what level, without writing an essay. If the answer is "well, it depends on which part," the skill is too big and wants splitting. If the answer is a plain yes or no with nothing in between, it's a small skill — and that's fine too, the method has a place for those.

Skills are also where connections live. A skill can require other skills before it (its prerequisites) and can unlock many skills after it. Those links are what turn a pile of abilities into a map with paths through it — but that's the next page.

For now, the one habit to build: whenever you catch yourself or anyone else using a continent-word — "marketing," "leadership," "React" — ask which part, specifically? The answers are the skills.

Prerequisites

A prerequisite is a skill you need before another skill becomes learnable. You can't write media queries before you know CSS basics; you can't run an email campaign before you can write one email. Prerequisites are how the forest knows the order of things — they're the arrows on the map.

Two rules make prerequisites work, and both are about defining things once.

Prerequisites live on the skill itself. They're defined once, at the organisation level — not inside any particular tree. A tree only shows a grouping of skills; the connections between those skills already exist on the skills themselves. So if two connected skills are both pulled into a tree, they arrive already linked. Define the connection once, and every tree that ever shows those skills agrees about it.

No double-linking. If B depends on A, and C depends on B, then C connects through B — never also directly back to A. The chain A → B → C already says everything; an extra A → C arrow adds clutter without adding information. Keeping chains clean is what keeps a tree readable at a glance.

A skill can have several prerequisites and can unlock many skills — chains branch and merge. That's normal and healthy; it's what makes the map look like a tree instead of a ladder.

Two kinds of skill

Every skill in a forest is one of exactly two kinds. The split answers a simple question: is there anything meaningful to grade?

No-level skills (yes/no). Some abilities are small enough that you either know them or you don't. Media queries are the classic example: once you can write them, there's no interesting difference between a "beginner" and an "expert" at media queries. Grading it would be theatre. These skills are a plain checkbox — you hold it or you don't.

Three-level skills. Bigger abilities are worth growing through. These carry three levels — beginner, confident, and expert — and the levels behave like rungs: each one is a prerequisite of the next. You pass through beginner on the way to confident, always. In a tree, each level is treated as its own skill, which is why you'll see names like "React I" and "React II" sitting one above the other.

How to choose the kind when cutting a new skill:

The next page defines what the three levels actually mean, because the method leans hard on those definitions being concrete.

The three levels

The three levels are the load-bearing definitions of the whole method — everything from self-assessment to promotion runs through them. They're written so you can place yourself without guessing.

Beginner. You know the basics — say, right after an online course or a book. You can do it, but you need help or a lot of documentation along the way.

Confident. You have hands-on experience. You do most tasks and deliver on your own, reaching for docs or help only on the less common parts.

Expert. You have considerable experience. You handle almost everything without help, looking things up only for the obscure or uncommon cases. A useful framing: an expert is confident enough to teach others.

Two footnotes that matter more than they look:

Even experts look things up. Skills evolve; needing materials or research at any level is normal and expected. "Expert" never means "memorised everything" — that bar would be both impossible and pointless.

The invisible zero. Under the hood, a skill is stored at level 0, 1, 2, or 3 — where 0 simply means "no level" (a yes/no skill). It is not a secret rung below beginner, and it's never shown to people. Humans only ever see beginner / confident / expert, or a plain yes/no.

One cultural note: the level names can be adapted. "Beginner / confident / expert" travels well across cultures precisely because the steps are broad; finer gradations (five-point scales, percentage mastery) tend to spark debates the method is designed to avoid. If the words don't fit your culture, change the words — keep the three broad steps.

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. The method uses a single rule of thumb:

Progressing a skill by one step should take roughly a month, up to about three.

That's the whole rule. It gives you two tests:

When in doubt, aim bigger. A broad skill has a natural escape hatch: it gets separated into levels, and each level behaves like its own step. An over-split skill has no such rescue — you just end up with twelve checkboxes where one honest skill should be.

The month-to-three-months window isn't arbitrary. It matches the method's rhythm elsewhere: individual progress is reviewed roughly monthly, so a well-cut skill visibly moves within one or two check-ins. Progress you can see on that cadence is what keeps people engaged; a map where nothing ever changes is a map people stop reading.