Last week I experienced a very interesting perspective shift. Of all the places it happened when we spent some time with the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors at their combined Wales and South West regional meeting. The theme of the meeting was to explore the interplay between the audit and human resources functions. When we were invited to come along and make a presentation we couldn’t resist the temptation to further contextualise this relationship within the paradigm shift between the Information age and the Networked age, and all of the culture change imperatives this shift entails.
We were impressed by the audit tribe. On the one hand they have a certain special autonomous status that grants them access to all parts of the corporate system. On the other hand they appear to be segregated by structure and culture even within organisations. This appears to be a legacy of industrial era modes of organisation and the cultural artefacts of this are a distinct language and an external perception of them as a sort of police function. Our view is that as we shift from industrial forms of organisation to networked forms, and as we shift from waterfall development to agile development, auditors need to be embedded in all clusters of the organisational network and will play a crucial role in the design of new processes and services.
The next time you come across an auditor, try to resist the temptation of transacting according to an ‘us vs them’ profile. Let them into your part of the network and invite them to help you craft the future.
Here are the slides from the presentation (with a few additions for some extra depth on some of the topics covered). If you were at the session (or even if you weren’t) we would welcome any feedback in the comments below.
If you work in audit and would like to explore these ideas further within the context of your organisation, The Satori Lab can help you and we’re waiting for your call.