We offer two training services:
Accounting Shenanigans Workshops
Our Accounting Shenanigans workshops are a 2 x two-hour series.
These are practical workshops that provide worked examples of accounting fudges that we have observed on the ASX 300 and is in effect a “how to” guide to spot these tricks.
First session:
Cash flow fudges: Factoring, payment plans, classifications of cash flow, acquisitions, round-tripping cash, gross v net cashflow.
Revenue recognition: Reality v policy.
Acquisition accounting: Business combinations are a black box with potential to impact all three financial statements over a number of years.
Second session:
Making the P&L numbers – near balance date transactions, significant items, hollow logs, capitalised expenses.
Balance sheet indicators – Receivables, revenue recognition, debt that is not debt.
Accounting standards and metrics – AASB9, AASB15, AASB16. These changes led to a lot of noise which can be used to improve metrics like EBITDA.
Conversation matters: behavioural analysis and interviewing skills for professionals
About
This course aims to provide you observational, analytical and strategic interviewing skills that simultaneously optimising your information-gathering and deception detection capacity, before, during and after important professional interactions. Evidence-based interviewing and lie detection research is incorporated into five modules with incremental focus on specialised cognitive and verbal skills for the purpose of deception detection. These include investigative interviewing principles and practices; content analysis; individual and relational cognitive risk factors informing specific cognitive lie detection strategies.
Course rationale
Many of us have experienced unproductive professional interactions that have wasted our time and energy – where we have learned very little or nothing of value. Perhaps we felt more like a spectator at an underwhelming performance more than a participant engaged in a real conversation. Such cognitive and verbal avoidance can feel impenetrable, but breaking through conversational performance barriers; understanding how to assess true behavioural motivations; disentangle logical coherence; formulate individualised cognitive approaches and “reality test” potentially deceptive information can help you feel more capable, confident and pro-active in what might otherwise be passive or unproductive interactions.
Generic skills in behavioural analysis and interviewing will require gradual implementation into your work context and to your specific professional context and role. We recommend consulting and helping your colleagues in developing these techniques over time, according to your workplace needs.
A fundamental theme throughout the course is the cumulative focus of evidenced-based cognitive and verbal dynamics in productive conversations. Many intelligent and articulate interviewees are supremely skilled in conversational avoidance – these tendencies can potentially escalate into frustration for all involved but a calm, low-status, patient, curious approach is always desirable. An interviewer’s approach to an avoidant interviewee is best informed by what disarming strategies are most likely to be effective.
Course Structure
- Module 1 aims to help you address conversational disengagement strategies performative or evasive interviewees present with. By deconstructing the conversation dynamics in real time and inviting a more cooperative interaction you will improve a) your professional relationship, b) the quality and quantity of information you’re seeking, and c) significantly improve the “cognitive currency” and therefore your deception detection capacity. This means addressing conversational dynamics directly in real time.
- Module 2 delves further into conversation motivation, approach and avoidance. Aspects of the psychology of motivational interviewing (by William Miller) and behaviour change categorisation (by Prochaska and DiClement) are provided, as a way for you to quickly assess how motivated an interviewee is about whatever behavioural topic you’re hoping to assess, address or facilitate change towards. Many deceptive interviewees prefer to say as little as possible about contentious issues – in such circumstances, motivational interviewing significantly improves your ability to elicit good information and make “lying by omission” difficult by respectfully enquiring about underlying reasons for evident behavioural priorities and decisions. Importantly, some interviewees (and organisations) indulge in performative motivation by way of claiming they are more and morally motivated to solve serious problems than their behaviour indicates – this common motivational discrepancy between explicit and implicit motivation is also important to grasp if you want to enhance conversational efficiency or inform subsequent cognitive deception detection.
- Module 3 many interviewees lack logical coherence; convey vague or circular reasoning, or provide superficial reasoning for substantial topics. Their reasoning and content can reveal more than you might expect upon closer inspection. Various psychological, written and verbal tendencies are strongly and predictively associated with behavioural outcomes. For example, cognitive distortions such minimising, externalising or avoidance of verifiable data can provide evidence-of-absence red flags and guide you towards what might be conspicuously missing.
- Module 4 addresses the innate self and relational biases we humans are all prone to – particularly when these biases are amplified by status, power, wealth, fame and success. Healthy narcissism can become unhealthy easily and quickly enough in the absence of frank and fearless feedback incrementally replaced by sycophants. Further, we all have individual biases that affect both interviewer and interviewee perceptual accuracy. And there are particular important cognitive blind spots (and relative strengths) that can quickly help us understand a particular individual perspective.
- Module 5 is the destination of all prior course learning points integrated into an applied framework for interview planning and strategy – including specific cognitive verbal lie detection methods. By increasing cooperative engagement; motivational clarity, logical coherence and minimizing cognitive avoidance, the imposition of high cognitive load questioning can optimise dynamic lie detection.
Course aims
CM aims to provide you with an evidence-based skills framework for you to improve information gathering, assess individual credibility; content plausibility and veracity without unnecessary damage to your professional relationships.
Course approach
• We often illustrate with extreme cases for clearer demonstration of learning points
• We take a non-confrontational, disarming and respectful approach to interviewing
• We adopt a scientific, evidence-based, apolitical, non-pathologising and non-judgmental approach
• We use public domain information only (and perhaps OSINT)
• We are flexible & open to suggestion – and welcome being interrupted, as we prefer to be interactive
WE PROVIDE SERVICES THAT HELP OWNERS
Promote an intelligent, evidence-based public debate on governance issues.
Use shareholder rights to their advantage at company meetings.
Monitor, defend and advance their ownership rights throughout capital markets.
Identify governance risk in the companies they hold.
We offer two training services: Accounting Shenanigans Workshops and Interview Skills.