Deep Dive: Executive Summary

1st December, 2026 | 13:30 - 17:00 CET
2nd December, 2026 | 13:30 - 17:00 CET

Connect the dots – don’t hand your board a puzzle.

For your most senior stakeholders, the executive summary is the audit report – it’s all they read. Too many executive summaries are still a list of findings, and a list is not a message.

This workshop is dedicated entirely to the executive summary: what belongs there, what doesn’t, and how to write an audit conclusion that delivers a message – insight the reader can act on, not a recap of the fieldwork results. Guidance, language, and exercises from the audit conclusion through the key issues, including tone, balance, and formality for the most senior readers in the organization.

The bar: a senior reader – audit committee member, board member, C-suite – understands the message in one pass, unaided. What happened, why it matters, and what happens next, without ever flipping back to the detail. That’s when the executive summary starts doing its job.

This is a working workshop: concepts are explored through discussion and exercises, with writing practice and live critique from the group and the trainer, ensuring participants leave able to turn any set of findings into one clear message.

What changes:

–     Executive summaries deliver a conclusion – one clear message, not a findings recap.

–     Insight replaces repetition – readers get the what, the why, the so what, and the now what.

–     Senior readers act after one reading – no clarifying emails, no “what does this mean for us?”

–     Writing the executive summary gets faster – the hardest page in the report stops being written last, worst, and under the most pressure.

–     Conversations at the top change – less explaining the report, more discussing the risks in it.

For: Auditors-in-charge and above – whoever writes, assembles, or owns the executive summary.

Recommended prerequisite (not required): Deep Dive: Findings. The executive summary is distilled from the findings – if the findings are weak, no summary can save them.

Working material: The strongest results come from working on your own writing – participants ideally bring an anonymized report from their own audits to work with; realistic practice material is provided as an alternative. For in-house deliveries, the team works on its own reports in its own confidential environment.

Trainer:
Tracie Marquardt is a 2024 and 2025 Beacon Award recipient and sought-after Audit Results Strategist. She helps Chief Audit Executives and their teams transform audit results through communication, leadership, and productivity.

As an audit reporting expert, Tracie addresses audit's core challenge: deriving and communicating results that add value to stakeholders. She guides teams in redesigning outdated audit report templates and builds their capability to deliver exceptional reporting at the intersection of human judgment and AI-driven communication.

Tracie has trained 13,000+ international internal auditors across industries. She is a keynote speaker at audit conferences worldwide.

She launched Inspiring Women in Audit in 2024, the industry podcast amplifying women's voices in internal audit around the globe. The podcast has a supporting LinkedIn community of over 600 internal audit professionals.