What follows is one skill, decoded through SPDF, rendered illustratively. The skill belongs to a financial analyst trained to read a company's financial chain and locate where it is breaking. The framework being decoded is BIRD — Business Interlinkages for Results and Development — a structured diagnostic that traces the relationship between sales, capital efficiency, return on capital, and sustainable growth. We use it here because it is well-defined, frequently applied, and a useful illustration of how SPDF handles a skill that already has scaffolding around it.
Worked Example
Diagnosing the Financial Linkages Chain
The skill being decoded
The analyst's task: take a company's published financials, run them through the BIRD interlinkage chain, identify where the chain is breaking, and produce a verdict — survive, succeed, or prosper — with the specific chain-break point named.
This is not a calculation. The numbers are the easy part. The skill is in the reading — knowing when a deteriorating ROCE is structural and when it is a one-off, knowing whether a falling sustainable growth rate is a financing problem or an operating problem, knowing which interlinkage to look at first for a given sector.
Stage 1 — Elicitation (excerpt)
A typical elicitation interview surfaces material like this:
For a manufacturing company, I look at asset turnover before margin. For a services company I do it the other way. The reason is that asset-heavy businesses break at the capital efficiency stage first; asset-light businesses break at the margin stage first. Most analysts miss this. They run the chain in textbook order and get the answer late.
This sentence — buried in twenty minutes of conversation — is the kind of judgement SPDF is designed to capture.
Stage 2 — Structuring (excerpt)
The same judgement, structured:
Rule: Order of chain inspection depends on asset intensity.
IF (fixed_assets / total_assets) > 0.5 → inspect asset turnover first
ELSE → inspect operating margin first
Rationale: Capital-intensive businesses fail at capital efficiency
before they fail at margin; asset-light businesses do the reverse.
Edge case: Holding companies and conglomerates require segment-level
analysis; the rule applies at segment level, not group level.This is one rule among perhaps thirty that together constitute the analyst's BIRD-reading skill.
Stage 3 — Agent-Readiness Diagnostic Score (excerpt)
Skill
BIRD chain-break diagnosis
Decodable: 78% — high, because the analyst's reasoning is largely rule-based once surfaced.
Reserved for human judgement: 22% — sector-specific exception calls and the final verdict on whether a chain-break is cyclical or structural. These remain with the analyst; the agent flags them rather than deciding.
Stage 4 — Deployable Agent Specification (excerpt)
The output is a specification document; the system prompt fragment looks like this:
You are a financial linkages diagnostic agent operating to the BIRD methodology. Your task is to run a company's financials through the interlinkage chain and locate the break point. Inspect in the order specified by the asset-intensity rule (see specification §3.1). For each interlinkage, return the calculated value, the trend, and a one-line interpretation. Do not return a final verdict on whether the break is cyclical or structural — flag this for analyst review with the evidence on both sides.
The tool layer connects to the company's reporting database, regulatory filings, sector benchmarks, and the analyst's previous diagnoses for comparison.
Your skill will not look like this. That is the point. The skills that matter most in your organisation are the ones that have not yet been written down.