You learn so much more when you say nothing

Silence can act like a question.

I learned this one day as a new IT auditor. I had just gone back to Agnes from accounts for the third time with questions I’d missed the first two times.

As I was looking down at my notebook, desperately trying to decipher what I’d written because I didn’t want to come back for a fourth time, she blurted out, ‘Joe has access, so he can check on things when I’m away.’

Joe, the IT manager, should definitely not have had access to the finance system – a red flag from an auditor’s perspective. If you want to know what’s really going on, be silent.

To help me stay silent I often sing the Sesame Street 1,2,3,4,5 pinball song a couple of times in my head. Someone will almost always fill the silence.