FISH — Fault, Impact, Solution, Help

FISH is a simple reflection tool for the moment something has gone wrong. It gives you four steps to work through with the learner — Fault, Impact, Solution, Help — so that a mistake becomes a piece of learning rather than a telling-off. It is the working detail behind See it, Say it, Sort it, and it pairs with the scenarios in adapting the lesson.

The whole tool rests on one rule: don't tell — ask. Every step below is a set of questions for the learner to answer. If you find yourself supplying the answers, you have stopped coaching.

F — Fault

Establish what actually happened, neutrally and specifically, before anyone tries to fix it.

• What went wrong?
• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• Where did it happen?

Resist the urge to name the fault yourself. A learner who can describe their own error has already done half the learning; a learner who has been told what they did has done none of it. If they genuinely cannot see it, narrow the question rather than answering it — "what were you looking at as we came out of that bend?"

I — Impact

A fault the learner does not think mattered will not change their driving. Impact is where the risk becomes real to them.

• Who was it hard for?
• Who else was affected?
• What impact did it have?
• What level was the impact?

That last question is the important one and the one most often skipped. Getting the learner to grade the seriousness themselves — nothing much, a bit awkward, genuinely dangerous — is what separates a fault they will remember from one they will repeat. It is the same judgement the examiner makes when deciding between a driving fault, a serious and a dangerous on the DL25, and it is the heart of risk management.

S — Solution

The learner's fix, not yours.

• What can they do differently?
• What can they do next time?
• What will they try?
• What needs to improve most?

A solution the learner proposes gets tried; a solution you impose gets forgotten by the next roundabout. Where several things went wrong, "what needs to improve most?" makes them prioritise — which is a skill in itself, and stops the debrief turning into a list.

Once they have named it, turn it into a goal you can both check against. SMART is the usual way to phrase it.

H — Help

Only now do you offer anything.

• Who can help them?
• What help do they need?
• What type of help will support them?
• What support would help most?

This is the handover of responsibility in miniature. The options are usually some version of: shall I tell you, shall I remind you, or would you rather try it on your own? Whatever they choose becomes the agreed level of support for the next attempt — and the thing you deliberately withdraw as they improve. The same negotiation appears in the coaching flow in adapting the lesson and in the responsibility strand of intervention.

See it, Say it, Sort it

FISH sits inside a three-word habit that describes the whole debrief:

• See it — you notice something, and so do they.
• Say it — it gets named out loud, factually, by whoever spotted it.
• Sort it — you agree what changes, and what help goes with it.

You will also meet the near-identical see it, say it, coach it. The first two words mean the same thing; the difference is only where the emphasis lands. Sort it is the debrief habit on this page — reach a fix and agree the help. Coach it is the in-lesson version, the cause → risk → solution → agreed support flow you run when a problem surfaces mid-drive. Same instinct, two moments.

A close relative you may see written as SBIS covers the same ground in four prompts, and works well for behaviour rather than technique:

• Situation — when, where and what happened? What is the challenge?
• Behaviour — what could you do differently next time?
• Impact — what impact did this have? Who else was affected?
• Support — what support will help you make the change?

Finishing with a confidence check

Close the reflection by asking the learner to place themselves on a simple confidence scale — very confident, confident, OK, nervous, very nervous — and to name the one thing they want to focus on next time. It takes fifteen seconds, it gives you an opening line for the next lesson, and it gives a quiet learner a way to tell you something they would not volunteer. There is more on turning that into a measurable goal in scaling and the SEDSS debrief.