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The Audit Podcast
Ep 242: Audit Like a Storyteller w/ Shagen Ganason (Liva Group)
00:37:40
This week on The Audit Podcast, we’re joined by Shagen Ganason, Group Chief Auditor, and Chief Audit Executive at . In this episode, Shagen shares the inspiration behind his new book, , and why he believes storytelling is one...
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- [00:00]
A
If assurance is a message, I think influences the art of making sure that the message is heard or understood or acted upon. And I think it's the quiet leadership that shapes culture, strengthens governance, and politely nudges the executives without ever having to say a word or having to raise your voice.
- [00:26]
B
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Audit podcast. I'm your host, Trent Russell. Today on the show we have Shagan Ganesan. He is the group head of internal audit, chief audit executive at Leva Group. He was also former member of the Institute relations committee for the IIA Global, and he is currently the author of the Storyteller's Ledger. So as you might imagine, a lot of the conversation, pretty much the entire conversation is around the book. The Storyteller's Ledger. Highly recommend it. We have had a lot of authors on the show, so I've gotten a lot of books around audit. We read them, formulate questions around those, and this was probably one of the more impactful ones. I think that anyone in the audit profession, honestly, otherwise should pick up and read and apply as well. I say apply because there are the templates and the process for how to do what Shagen talks about is in the book. And so it's not. I've read a lot of these kind of books that you get at the airport is what I call them in the business section. And you read them and there's kind of motivational and maybe it helps with your mindset, but you get done, it's like there's nothing practical in here. There's like some good quotes, but like I can't do anything with. With what's in here. I can't. There's not a step by step guide. That's not the case in this book. And largely what it centers around is how to effectively tell stories of our. We can call them audit findings at a high level, how to present to the board as a way to think about it or the audit committee as well, through storytelling. And storytelling. The art of it has been around forever. The science has been around for years and years and years and years and years also, especially around movies. It's always kind of a hot topic. We talk about that briefly in the episode. But anyway, I can't recommend it enough. Seriously, go buy it, read it and like follow it and I promise you you will have a better report or a better presentation the next time you have one. Specifically, some of the things that we do though is we talk about. We pull up a. So again, if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see this. If not, you can switch over to the YouTube channel and check it out there. But we asked to pull up a historical, or rather, sorry, traditional audit report and then pull up the new way that Shotgun recommends using storytelling. And which I will say now I recommend as well using storytelling. And so you can we compare and contrast the two side by side. You can see the difference between those two. And so I think that's very powerful. You can see, like, this is probably how most audit departments do it, kind of the five Cs way of doing things. I know not everybody does that. Literally every audit department does something a little bit different with their audit reports. And so of course, of course it's not going to be exactly the same as yours, but you get the general idea and then how to take that and then translate it into a story that's going to be significantly more impactful. And then within that, we also talk about, like, how do you share these stories? Is it in the. Just the report? Like, you type it up, do you do it verbally with the audit committee? Use the data visualizations, all that kind of good stuff. And then one of the quotes, or rather the lines from the book, and I'll read it directly. Now it's really short. Was when Shaggin said the final 60 seconds might matter more than anything that came before it. And so we talk about the importance of closing and how to do that, which Shagen also hits at in the book. Like, literally, he tells you how to do all this in the book. So again, it's on Amazon, the storyteller's ledger. Definitely. Go check it out. There's a. There's a link in the show notes. If you're lazy or you forget, you can just click that link. It'll take you to that. The last thing we end with is how Shaggin coaches his teams, I. E. How you can coach your teams how to do this. So if you are one of the people who listen to this, you read the book and you go, yep, we need to implement this. Shagen talks about his process for how he's taught his teams how to do the exact same thing. Here we go. Hey, everybody. Before we go to the show, quick announcement. On September 24th and 25th, 2025, we'll be having the Audit analytics and AI Conference. So block your calendars. It's going to be between 9 and 4 Central. That's 9 and 4 Chicago time. So again, that's September 24th and 25th. If you're in your car Right now, probably want to pull over, go ahead and put that in your calendar. Save the date. There more to come from us, but want to let you know, save the date September 24, September 25, 9 to 4 Central. So, Shagen, what's in your Internet browsing or ChatGPT copilot history, anything like that? Just anything personal and professional. Maybe not too personal, but personally, professionally, that you've been kind of looking into recently?
- [05:14]
A
Well, Trent, my. My chat GPT history is pretty boring. Professional. I break it down professionally and personally. Right. So professionally is filled with riveting searches like risk and insurance audit frameworks and how not to bore your audit committee. So stuff like that. From a personal perspective, it swings wildly between planning a holiday that I. An imaginary holiday that I never take or never seen the book, to reading about historical events that I already know and also looking up recipes that I have no intentions.
- [05:49]
B
It's kind of like, kind of like YouTube for me. Then especially on the recipes thing, like, yeah, I'll watch this very beautifully produced how to cook whatever. And I'm like, oh, this video is amazing. And that looks amazing. And then inevitably I go, I'm never going to make this.
- [06:06]
A
Yeah, there are no conspiracy theories, no secret societies. But, you know, something comes up and I say, hey, what do I do with this recipe? This, this ingredient? And I'll search it up and. And yeah, that's where it ends.
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B
What's the. I think the.
- [06:18]
A
Pretty bored.
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B
You said how not to board the audit committee. That was something that you. You put in there. I think that's pretty interesting. Anything good come up there that you could share?
- [06:28]
A
Well, yeah, Talks about stuff like, you know, let them know what you think is important to them. Tells you not to bore them with details because they need to be at a higher level. Lots of theoretical stuff and lots of stuff which I think a lot of other auditors have tried and tested. They're really good. It's just that, you know, you read one and you read another, it sounds pretty much the same thing and it's just packaged differently. I think that's what ChatGPT does.
- [06:57]
B
So obviously the book is kind of the cornerstone of what we're talking about. And as I was reading through it, there was just a. Well, there's a bunch, but some of my favorite kind of quotes. And one I just wanted to read very short and then kind of throw it to you and, and have you expand on that. But in there it's pretty early on, maybe within the first chapter or two, you say, audit isn't just about assurance. It's about influence. I just wanted you kind of expand on that here.
- [07:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So audit has long outgrown the idea of providing assurance. That's my view. And I think while assurance remains sort of like a passport into the room, I think influence determines whether you stay in a room or whether you get invited back into the room. I mean, if you put it that way. To me, a good auditor does not just point out what went wrong, but he or she also needs to share what is right and what management needs to know. And I think from our work as auditors, we influence how leaders think about risk, how to prioritize change, how to make decisions, especially under pressure. And I think a strong audit not only highlights gaps, but it subtly steers the organization and the executives towards better practices, making better decisions and stronger controls. And to me, put it in an analogy. If assurance is a message, I think influences the art of making sure that the message is heard or understood or acted upon. And I think it's the quiet leadership that shapes culture, strengthens governance, and politely nudges the executives without ever having to say a word or having to raise your voice. And if you look at it in another analogy, which I just thought of, it's like it's a lighthouse without a beam, Right. Technically, it's still standing, but not much use to anyone unless lost their sea, unless there's lights are on. So similar. And assurance is like a lighthouse being there and the influence is actually turning the lights on so that people can see so that you don't get lost.
- [09:16]
B
And maybe the most softball question ever on the show is if we said how you do that, do we just. We point them to the storyteller's ledger right here and say, read the book. I mean, we're going to get into some of it today, but you want to really know how to do it. That's probably your best option, right?
- [09:31]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of examples in there. Yeah, real examples that I've done in the last 30 years. My mistakes.
- [09:37]
B
Speaking of examples. So it asked because I thought what would be really good is take this we'll just call traditional way of doing audit reporting and then basically apply your way of doing it through storytelling and then give like, show that to folks so they can see kind of the contrast between the two. So I'm going to share my screen real quick. For those that are watching on YouTube, you can see what we're talking about right here. We'll try for the audio folks to make it as Easy as possible to kind of understand it as well. So let me just quickly describe this as we get it pulled up. Hey, everybody, we're gonna take a quick break from our guests. And if you need to get analytics or AI actually working in your internal audit department, or if you already have some of it, you feel like you're not really getting exactly what you need out of it, you know, there's more you're not getting that. Go to the show Notes, look for the Green Skies analytics link. Click it on the website. There'll be other links that you can click that'll take you directly to a calendar to schedule time. It's literally three clicks to get the time scheduled to get it figured out. All right, back to the show. All right, so basically what we're looking at is we have this PDF that we're sharing. On the, on the left hand there's two columns. The left one is the traditional audit finding format. So it's got the kind of your five Cs, or here we have condition, criteria, cause, effect, recommendation, and then obviously all the text for those. And on the right we have the story based audit finding or the narrative format. So that's setting, building tension, turning point and resolution. And so basically at this point, I'm going to hand it over to Shagan and have you walk us through this example and kind of compare and contrast the two like. And like you said in the book, there's more of these. So I highly recommend it. I feel like the more examples you can get, the better on something like this. So anyway, with that said, I'm going to pass it over to you, Shaga, and walk us through what we're looking at here.
- [11:29]
A
Yeah, so this is an example that I picked up in the book. So basically it's a typical audit finding where someone would write. And if you look at how you would typically write an audit finding, you start with a condition or sometimes criteria, and then condition, and then we look at the cause, the effect, and the recommendation. That's the standard way of writing reports. But if you look at the way that you traditionally write a report, it's factually correct, it's not wrong, but it doesn't hook you in from the first sentence. It's rather dry if you call it that, because it basically tells you, you know, what you found, what do you expect to see, and what was the reason behind it. And it's pretty shallow. But if you look at it from a storytelling perspective, if you look at the story arc, any good story would have a context would have a setting. If you look at any movies or any stories that you've come across, and then usually there's a tension that's being built. It creates an uncertainty, creates some sort of conflict or things like that. And then there is a turning point where, you know, things start to materialize and becomes clearer as to why there was a tension. And then you find a resolution. And if you follow the story arc, it goes up and it comes down. So the story, sorry, the finding that I have got up here is like setting the context basically means that, you know, what did you see? And you put it in a story form so that you hook the reader right from the beginning. Like in this case, we talk about a recent expansion that created a past warehouse having issues with their inventory. And there could be a whole lot of reason why that inventory happens. And then you find that, you know, building tension, you identify things like the work pressure. The staff in the warehouse were under a lot of pressure. And as a result of that, they did this and they did manual workarounds, and they did a lot of things, which creates the tension. And then comes the turning point where as a result of all these things, they lost $2 million. That is a big thing, which somebody who can't do, and they want to find out what happens next. What do we need to do? What do we need to resolve that? And then you come down to the resolution part of it. If you follow the story and if follow how a story arc actually works, you go beyond what a traditional audit finding does, because it identifies the root cause, which is a lot more subtle. It is not so obvious. Like, for example, in this case, if you read the book, you'll find that the actual root cause was the cultural issue about people wanting to make the good choice of manual overrides. Obviously, it has caused a lot of issues, but if you do it in a traditional form, you will not find those cultural issues. Basically, it's black and white. It's binary, did this or that. And that's the beauty of using a storytelling.
- [14:16]
B
For those that go, hey, my audit committee, auditees, whoever you want, how you want to refer to them, they're used to condition criteria, cause, effect, recommendation, in that order, spelled out like that. And now, Shagan, you're saying basically, change that. Do you have any advice for how to basically sell this idea to them, to the stakeholders and go, look, we get it. We've always done it like that. Now we're going to do it this way. And then, even with that said, I guess the second Part of that in the audit report itself, would you lay it out? And so instead of having, like, condition, would you write setting? I mean, I'm sure you wouldn't write building tension, but I'm just. I'm trying to imagine. I've seen so many. I'm not even like an audit report writing, you know, consultant, you know, I'm all data and tech, but even then I've seen a lot of art reports and I've talked to a lot of audit report trainers and consultants. And this seems like every audit department does something a little bit different. So how can you take their. Their traditional way of doing it and then putting it into. And we'll just stick with the text format in this example. But how can they then, like, reformat it to where, again, stakeholders can. Can take that in? And it's not like, what. What is this? This is totally different. I don't get any of this. I'm sure they're going to get some level of pushback from somebody, you know, on committee, but what advice would you give there?
- [15:39]
A
What I did was normally what most auditors would do is to have those headings, condition criteria, cause, effect, recommendation, which are normally how you structure an audit report. What I did was slowly remove the heading and left condition criteria the way that I write a traditional audit report. And then you find that people get used to not seeing those headings. And then when you change things around and not putting in context and building tension and all that, but you still write a report as how you would write because the recommendation is at the end, and the first part of it, the context, you're building tension and all that builds up together with your conditional criteria. That is a story in itself. And if you look at the next page in the screen that you have, that is actually an audit finding. So you will not see the headings. But if you read through that finding, you'll find that it is actually how a traditional audit report used to look like, but it's written in a different format. And what is good about this is that it's very rarely I've come across an audit committee or a senior executive which finds it difficult to understand that, because the first paragraph itself, it hooks the reader into saying that, I want to know what's happening next, I want to know what's causing this. And then as they start reading into the second or third paragraph, and then that's basically, they want to know what the ending is. It's just like if you go into a movie and you go halfway through the movie, you can't stop it because you want to know what the ending is. So it is written in such a way that it actually still captures the whole thing factually. It's still exactly the same as what the traditional audit report is, but it's written in a format where it hooks somebody. And the moment you start reading it, you forget that, you know, the structure is missing.
- [17:23]
B
I just. I can imagine, because from experience, we used to take all the audit reports across, you know, all the various areas we were auditing. And so what we go to the audit committee, what they wanted was, we want the cause and we want the recommendation. And so we did that for years. Like, that's all they wanted. Just give us that and that for everything. All right, cool. And then eventually, someone new came on the audit committee, and that person said, that's great. I want the effect also. It's like, okay, so one of, like, you know, six people on this committee wants this. So we went, all right, so now it's the. So now we had the. The effect to it also. So I just could see, especially with so many people in the room, going, well, I want this way, and I want it this way, and I want it this way. And so even I think you might have to get creative for some folks, Even as I was looking at on the first page, where you had a few areas kind of underlined and your attention does go there. Like, that's. Immediately I opened it, I saw the underlining, I went straight there. And so that could be. What do you think, a technique for someone goes, look, I just want the effect. And you go, cool, we're going to do it in a story format, and then maybe just kind of underline that piece of it so that it draws their attention to that. So if anyone just wants that, they can go there. What do you. What do you think about that? Anything that you would add to that or just go, dude, that is a terrible idea. Just do what I'm telling you to do and it's going to be fine.
- [18:47]
A
No, I think every audit committee is different, as you put it. And you've got to know your audit committee. You got to know your audience as to what they want. And the purpose of me underlining those little texts is essentially so that you can actually see on the screen. But what I normally do is I put it bold. So anything that I want people to pick up on a bunch of texts, I'll normally make it bold so that, you know, your eyes automatically get attracted to that part of the thing. And. And Typically, you put things like, you know, $2 million. It's a huge thing that somebody would automatically want to pick up. If you, if you make it bold, it will stand out. And like you said, the cost and the effect is absolutely important. You want to know why something happened and as a result of that, what is the consequences with company. And if you made those things in bold, I think it's, it's very powerful. But if underlining works, you know, go for it. I mean, the thing is, at the end of the day, we're trying to sell an idea and we want to make, make sure it sticks. How it, how it's presented is immaterial as long as the risk is presented in such a way that your audience understands it.
- [19:49]
B
There's been a lot of studies or some studies on where they literally put retina reading cameras on people's laptops and screens. And then they would pull something like this up and then they would just see, like, where, you know, where does someone's eyes naturally go? And so even as I look at the top, there's some areas bolded there. But then obviously, like I was talking about, and then you have headings bolded in the body of it. And then you have the underlining my eyes, like, for whatever reason, they went straight to the underline. And so I'd say there's various techniques that people can use to draw attention to a certain spot of a written report. Dashboards is really where they did a lot of this research to see, hey, where do eyes go? You just pull up a dashboard. Where does someone's eyes go first? For whatever it's worth, red was. There's something red on there, and that's the only thing red. People's eyeballs are immediately going to go there. So anyway, there's, there's various techniques to do that for those that need to look into that a little bit more. But that's going to bring me to the next thing. And how are these communicated? So is it. Obviously here we have kind of a written format that people can share. But then when you present to the audit committee, is it just, hey, we're going to take all these narratives, we're going to, you know, put them together in a binder and hand those over? Or when you're presenting to the audit committee, do you go, all right, here's the two, like we had make up a number 50 findings this quarter. However, you know, whenever the cadence is to present, these two are the ones that are just like, absolutely critical. We have to talk about those do you then take those and do the more narrative storytelling where it's more verbal? Where does data visualizations come into play into kind of your process? Just overall, how do these get presented across the multiple stakeholders from the person executing on the control, the person who that they report to senior management and then maybe the board or audit committee. What does that look like?
- [21:46]
A
I think we have moved on from the time when we used to present an audit which is probably 100 pages long. My audit pack these days are probably 10 to 15 pages. And I think one of the things that we need to understand is every audience is different. Understanding your audience is the key, so that then you'll be able to craft your message according to each wants and needs. And also it's important to note that one format is not going to work for everyone else. In some of my audit committees I tend to do graphs and in a pictorial format. And some of my audio community members are more word focused. So they don't like to see pictures, they don't like to see colors, they like to see pets. So you got to understand who you're presenting to. And I think one of the critical part is that if you are going to present to lower management, I would probably have more details in it. So the report would probably be 10, 15 pages long, depending on how many issues you have. But if you're presenting it to the executives, it might be a little bit shorter. They are more interested in the executive summary, what caused the issue rather than what the issue actually was. And also what is the impact of the business. And if you're looking at it from an audit committee perspective, they are even at a higher level. And the thing about audit committees is that every audit committee member brings a different skill set. In my audit committee, I've got investors, I've got lawyers, I've got accountants, I've got regulators or ex regulators. So they all have a different perspective. And I think you as a CAE need to understand what their needs are and also need to be able to preempt what kind of questions they're going to ask. And for you to be able to present your audit committee deck in a way that answers the questions even before they ask it. And if you are able to do that, then you have really mastered it. But it's difficult. You need to understand your audit committee. It takes time for you to understand the audit committees. And normally if you have like 10, 15 findings in a report, I would normally highlight maybe be the top two or three of them, the one that has got the Most impact, because the audit committee, again, you're looking at the risk, right, for the whole organization, which has got the biggest risk, which has got the biggest impact to the business. And that's what they are interested in, in terms of fines or penalties from the regulators. Those are very important to some audit committee. So you bring up those things and you. You point it out rather than putting issue by issue. And sometimes what I also do is I'll summarize the 15 findings into maybe two or three key paragraphs. Rather than putting it finding by finding. I summarize the whole thing into two or three paragraphs and say that, you know, these are the three things that you need to be aware of. These are the three things that you need to ask management. These are the three things that you should be looking out for when you're assessing the risks.
- [24:31]
B
And that really works really well about their audit committee materials, because we'll help put together for them data visualizations, all that kind of good stuff. We'll talk to them and go, well, what does the audit committee want to see? And they're like, you know, a lot of times they go, I don't know, just go ask them, like, how do you want to see this? Like, what do you want to know? Do you want to know everything? You just want to know the top, you know, two breadth or, you know, whatever. I wouldn't necessarily put a number on it, but. And even as you're talking, I'm thinking like, okay, let's do a visual option for them. Let's do a summarized option for them. Let's do a detailed option for, like, almost lay it out. And then I think it's extremely fair to go to them and go, hey, we're going to, like, we're trying to make this the best possible solution for you. Here's your options. Like, what do you want to see from now on? And so at a minimum, even if you don't do that, I think it, it makes a ton of sense to put on the agenda. Or like, call your audit committee chair, the audit committee members, and just ask them, how do you want this presented from now on? Is there anything that we're not doing? And probably do that with each, you know, each time you get someone new on there, bring it up to them. I think it also shows that you're empathizing with them and that you're working with them to make it better. And I think they would appreciate it if, as a relationship builder as well.
- [25:42]
A
Yeah. And I think also not to undermine the audit committees. And I think there is also an fair element of us educating the Audit committees, because not every Audit Committee member has got the same kind of experience. And for us to be able to educate them and say that this is what you need to be looking at, these are the ones. These are the kind of questions that you need to be asking. And, you know, from my experience, I've found that some Audit Committee members, especially people who are new onto the Audit Committee space, they value that a lot, because, you know, you have been there and you've done that, and you have sat in multiple audit committees and being able to help them behind the scenes and tell them, this is what you should be looking at, this is what would help you in terms of your decision making, that really helps. It also builds the relationship bit, because.
- [26:23]
B
Then they're kind of on the same level, almost like, we're helping you, you help us, we're helping you, instead of just, okay, let me report to you and, like, almost bow down to whatever it is that you need. I like that perspective. So the other thing that we really try to do on this show is when there is something, because, I mean, there's literally an entire book written about what we're talking about and to try to take the kind of the 80, 20 approach of what's the one or two things that's going to make the biggest difference? And you made it pretty easy when, again, another quote from the book, you say the final 60 seconds might matter more than anything that came before it. And so immediately I read that and I went, all right, well, we're going to talk about that. Like, if that's the thing, maybe if we call that the one thing that we have to nail amongst all of this, then I want to make sure we hit on that. So you talk about, basically, it's how to close and the importance of that. So, again, just kind of. I'll. I'll throw the. Throw the. The microphone to you and let you just expand on that. I'll let you go on that.
- [27:22]
A
Yeah, I think the final 60 seconds or the final minute is where all the magic is. Or on the flip side, where the damage could potentially happen. No matter how good the audit was, no matter how many pages that you've presented, how thorough your evidence or how elegant your report is, it is often the closing that actually sticks in people's minds. I've presented decks to my audit committee, 15 pages long, and you go through all the details and you tell them your scope and you tell them your methodology and how you arrive at those things, but it is the end part of it is what basically people remember. And I think closing well, it's about leaving a clear and confident message without rushing, without rambling, and also introducing any last minute doubts in people's minds. It is the moment to sharpen your message, not to soften it, because you really want people to remember what you have just said. It also gives you an opportunity for you to summarize the key risks that you're trying to convey and reinforces the real world impact. I think that's pretty important. And I think the most important part of it is to make it clear that what needs to happen next, basically, you have presented all these things and this is what the issue is, what needs to happen after this. I think people rarely remember every slide, you know, or every point that you have made during a meeting, but they will remember how you made them feel, how reassured they were at the end of the meeting, how alarmed they were. I mean, if they, if there was a cause for alarm or how inspired they were based on, you know, the. The good things that's happening in a business or even worse, if you know, how confused they were. So basically, you want to balance that out. I think a strong case ties everything together, frames the way forward, and also leaves no one guessing what the next steps will be. It's a bit like, you know, as auditors, we take flights all over the world all the time, right? So we're familiar with flights taking off and landing. And you can have the best food on the plane, you can have the best seat on the aircraft, but the landing is where it really matters. I mean, if you had a really butter smooth landing, you have the best flight ever. But if it was a botched landing, or if it was, you know, windy or whatever it is, whatever happened in the past, in the, you know, the two hours flight, you completely forget about it, but you remember the landing. So to me, that's what. If you look at it as an analogy, I think closing the last 60 seconds is the most important part of a delivery, because that's what people.
- [30:02]
B
We summarize that this image of play just like going down now. All right, now that is a really good analogy and there's a lot of good. Like, I can pick up on the storytelling that you speak to in the book because you do it really seemingly naturally as we're talking through this, like. But just the visual of that in my head will probably stick with me more so than anything else that we've talked about so far. I think everything we've talked about has been great and actionable and there's a lot that the listeners can take from this. But I don't think I'll ever be able to get the idea of whenever there's a, the close to a meeting of this vision in my head of just a prank, a plane, just straight nose diving and blowing up. So thank you for, for sharing that. I do know there's, there's a lot of what I feel like probably the best auditors that I know are, are the ones who will pick up this book and read it or pick up a Norman Marks book or a Richard Chambers book or something like that and read that. Not to say that those that don't aren't great also, but the ones that do, I can usually tell like, all right, you're pretty good, you take this pretty serious, if nothing else, or you're genuinely curious about how to be better at the position. But of course there's, there's going to be people who aren't for whatever reason, maybe this, you know, maybe an audio or video version of what we're talking about is good enough for them. And that's how they do things. And reading text or a book isn't really their thing. So all that to say there's some, they're going to read this, they're going to take off with it and they're going to help kind of implement it throughout their, their teams. Also for those people, how do, how can they coach the rest of their teams to go, I read this, this is how we're going to implement. How do you coach your teams to do this? Do you just like force everyone to read it? How do you do that?
- [31:46]
A
Not so harsh. Normally when my team presents an audit finding where they've done an audit, they will have most of the time structured in a way, the traditional way. The first question I ask is what does the whole finding tell you? What is the story behind this? What, what would someone look at and see and how does it impact them? And I try to take away clutter jargon and basically you don't want to bury the key message that you have in the third paragraph or the fourth paragraph. And if you find that it's something really critical, something that you really want people to know, bring it up front. And that is a good way of starting it. So I had a template and in the book I've explained the tips, how I created that. So basically what I do is that any finding itself, take it up and put it aside and then don't Read the finding itself, but ask questions like, what does this mean to me? What does this mean to the business? What is the two or three key things that I want to talk about? And what are the two or three key things that stands out? And you pull that up front and you write the first paragraph. Forget about the structure of conditional criteria and all that. Write the first two or three key things in the first paragraph and then say that what did it cost? What consequence did it cost to the business? And as a result of that, would the business have lost or gained as a result of that? Then what can you do to resolve that? So if you follow that structure, you find that you automatically start to create a story arc. And when you start reading it the next day, normally what I'll do is I'll write something up, I'll leave it, even though it's written by somebody else. But the best thing is to put it aside and come back again the next day and read through it again. And you'll find that you pick up things that you never picked up the day before, and that gives you your mind to start working the scenes. It's just like if you're reading a book, you start to create visual pictures in your mind, just like the plain story that you just, you know, you just said. So if you read the book the second. Sorry, read the finding the second day, and if you can create a mental picture of what the issue is all about, then you have started the journey about storytelling. And I think that's the thing. That's the training that I give my teams. Most people get it after a few times if you follow a structure. But if you just randomly start writing, I mean, it's difficult because we are auditors and we are trained to write in such a way for years. Right? And for us to just flip, it's not easy. We're not John Grisham or, you know, Lee Chow or any of those orphans.
- [34:16]
B
So the advice is procrastinate. Yeah, I like that. I can do that. I can do that. All right. And I think the other thing I like about this, especially for those that get the book, you talk about the templates. And so basically it's not, hey, you have to go take some story. There's tons of storytelling. Like, go just storytelling training for various, you know, for executives, for actors, for directors, for script. Like, whatever it is, it's. It's almost, I think, a joke amongst, like, the Hollywood folks about storytelling at this point. But so there's tons of trainings that you can go take to do all this storytelling. But what you're saying is basically, or what I'm going to say for you, get the book, the templates are in there, the questions that you need to ask of yourself and of your team are in there and the process is in there also. So basically in the book, which takes, you know, a few hours to read, like you can go through, read it, knock it out, pull out what you need to to make this work for your team and then really stop, not stop providing assurance, but in addition to that, actually influence the folks that you need to. This is probably the most common way I close out the show and so people are probably tired of hearing about it. But I absolutely love it when there are actionable, practical takeaways that people can listen to. And, and this one especially look at on the YouTube channel and see the, the before and after traditional versus storytelling way of doing this as well as again, pick up the book. It'll tell you to do all this and save you probably hours and hours and hours of, of training. But um, so anyway, with that said, thank you so much for the book and for coming on and I want to leave it to you though. What do you want to leave the audience with?
- [35:54]
A
If I could leave the audience with one thing, it would be this. Life is too short to take yourself too seriously and or to trust a five minute recipe that ends up taking two hours and half of your patience. I think on a personal note, most of the best things in life to me come from a bit of chaos. Missed flights, unexpected career turns, half baked ideas that somehow become full journeys. And even writing this book, for example, which started as a small side project to clear my head, somehow or other snowballs into this very reason I'm here talking to you. So proof that sometimes chaos has a pretty good sense of humor. So whether you're chasing a promotion or your personal best, or the world's best street food, just remember, I think enjoy the detours, pack a sense of humor and stop to pet the dog, even if it's not yours.
- [37:02]
B
Hey everyone, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Audit podcast. Whatever platform you're listening on right now, I'm sure there's a subscribe button somewhere, so please hit the subscribe button there. If you're listening through itunes or Spotify, feel free to go give us that five star rating. It only took me about 16 seconds to give myself a five star review and it really helps to get future guests to come on the show, so we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, be sure to check out the show notes and follow us on all our social media channels, on Instagram, on LinkedIn and on TikTok. Also, if you're interested, please sign up for our weekly newsletter from the Audit Podcast. Thank you all. Have a great one.