When I read this newspaper story, I saw some lessons about creativity and performance auditing.

• A motorcyclist, [Rich] Allen no longer could tolerate the potholes, crevices and lunar landscape he encountered on his daily commute on the 60 Freeway near his Moreno Valley job.

• With a tiny video camera wedged between his face and helmet visor, Allen drove the route one day while talking into a microphone. He posted the video on YouTube, the popular video-sharing website, so viewers could see the choppy pavement Allen is talking about.
• One of his best lines on the video: "When you see what I'm about to show you, you're going to fall off your chair, and hopefully I won't fall
• The Riverside Press-Enterprise subsequently ran a story about the video, attracting the attention of two television stations that did stories on Allen's novel campaign. Within two weeks of the video hitting the Internet, Caltrans -- one of the agencies Allen had been badgering -- repaved that part of the freeway.
• "That's how you get things done in the 21st century," Allen now says. ¹ 

Notice how Allen's story parallels a performance audit.  Allen identified an issue.  He collected evidence, his observations recorded on video.  He assessed the effect, "...hopefully I won't fall off the motorcycle."  He publicly reported his findings.  He had impact.

Selecting an audit topic provides the first chance to exhibit creativity.  Some of the more creative audit work starts with picking a topic that directly impacts users of government services.  The City Auditor in Stockholm looked at the extent of bullying and what, if anything, was being done about it.  That's really creative.  I think that sort of approach comes when auditors try to find a different point of view.  That different point of view is often the user of the service - the motorcyclist who has to deal with the potholes rather than the engineer who has to fix them or the elected officials who have to find funding.

Another chance to be creative in performance auditing comes in developing and applying a method.  Allen directly observed the condition.  You can't get better audit evidence than a video of the conditions.  Creative use of video is sure to be a growing feature of performance audit work.  A few years ago West Palm Beach won a Knighton Award for an audit of traffic calming.  Part of the presentation was a video that showed how difficult it could be for a driver to see traffic at an intersection if the landscaping around the traffic calming wasn't properly maintained.  Once again, a different point of view is at work in the West Palm Beach audit.

Use of video for collecting evidence leads directly to use of video, in this case posted on the internet, to report the results of audit work.  Audit Scotland makes good use of internet-based audio reporting.  Go to the Audit Scotland web page and you'll find Podcasts summarizing their work.  You want really creative reporting?  Take a look at the comic book version of the 911 Commission Report.

I could go on finding examples of creative audit work, but instead I want to move on to why some audit work is particularly creative.  Christopher Pollitt addresses exactly that question:

"...innovations [in performance audit methods] do take place.  When we asked about particular studies that seemed to us to be unorthodox or novel in their designs, the typical answers involved a combination of factors - the nature of the particular study topics, the assignment of particular auditors with special skills or interests, the willingness of senior members of [the audit organization] to countenance limited ‘experiments' at particular times, and so on." ²

Pollitt, who was studying performance auditing, tells us that creative, innovative work isn't so much happening on purpose.  It happens when a particular set of circumstances happen to coincide.

So, how might an audit shop increase the chances for creative, innovative work?

Make it easy to both comply with your office's written policies and procedures and try something new.  The easiest way is to set up a process to allow exceptions to the normal process.  When you try something new, tell your audit committee and the auditee that you're taking a different approach on the project.

Look for new ideas.  Devote some time every week to hunting for new ideas.  That might mean setting aside an hour to read audit reports from other shops; or to read research coming out of universities; or to talk to neighborhood leaders.  Make it an expectation that all of the audit staff will spend a little time each week looking for ideas.

Put the word "creative" into your job descriptions and job postings.  I looked at 10 recent job postings on the ALGA web page.  The word creative showed up in one.  Yet, when you talk to auditors about why they like their jobs, they'll tell you that they like creative, critical thinking and working on different subjects.  Make sure that message makes it to the job announcement.

Evaluate your work.  How could you have done the work with fewer audit hours?  How could you have reported the work better?  What would it take to have better impact?  Some new ideas might come up.

Send positive signals about new ideas.  If an auditor brings up an idea, whatever you do, don't say, "that wouldn't work because...."  Even if you're sure the idea wouldn't work (maybe because it has been tried repeatedly and failed).  Ask a question.  "Walk me through how that would work?"  When you're evaluating a new idea, try listing the pros before you list the cons.

These ideas are all modest.  They are trying to improve the environment for those innovations that Pollitt wrote about.  They are, at best, tiny little baby steps.  Some of those steps will work.  Some won't.  The hope is that more steps are forward than backward and that an incremental process will lead to work that is cheaper to produce and has more impact.

Mike Eglinski, City Auditor, City of Lawrence, KS

¹ Source: Youtube videos give commuters a taste of other cities, traffic, by Steve Hymon, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2008,

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-roadsage19-2008may19,0,4211545.column?page=1

² Source:  Christoper Pollitt, Xavier Girre, Jeremy Lonsdale, Robert Mul, Hilkka Summa, Marit Waerness, Performance or Compliance?: Performance Audit and Public Management in Five Countries, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Average user rating