Australasian Veterinary Boards Council: Clarity Under Pressure
CASE STUDY - DELIVERED THROUGH IMPACT PRACTICE
The Australasian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC) is the peak standards and accreditation body for veterinary regulation across Australia and New Zealand. It’s a small organisation with a big mandate, and in early 2026, the team was in the middle of a significant governance transition, moving to a new legal structure with a new Board due to start on 1 July.
The kind of transition that would stretch any organisation. For a three-person executive team juggling regulatory responsibilities alongside the operational groundwork for a new governance model, it was relentless. There was no shortage of things to do. The challenge was that everything felt urgent, nothing was clearly sequenced, and the team was pulling in different directions without a shared view of what needed to happen first.
The CEO knew what the team needed: a structured process to step back, take stock and agree on priorities. She also knew she couldn’t be the one to run it. As a leader in a small organisation, she was both the person who should be facilitating that conversation and one of the people who needed to be fully in it. Doing both well at the same time isn’t realistic, so she brought in Impact Practice to design and lead the process, freeing the whole executive team to participate equally.
The engagement was deliberately designed to be short, focused and accessible, scoped to fit a small organisation’s budget and timeline. Over three weeks, I ran individual pre-work questionnaires to draw out each team member’s priorities and concerns, distilled the responses into a set of common themes, and facilitated two workshops (each two hours) with the full executive team. The sessions were designed to move quickly from the big picture down to concrete, sequenced actions.
Between and after the workshops, I organised the issues into four work streams – Board and Committee Readiness; People, Organisation and Change; Process, Policy and Procedures; and Systems and Technology – and developed an operational priorities workplan. Each item had an owner, a timeframe and a clear indication of what needed to happen – both before the new Board started and in the months that followed.
Beyond the deliverable itself, the process gave the executive team something they rarely get in a small, stretched organisation: protected space to stop, think together and get on the same page. That turned out to matter as much as the plan.
AVBC now has a shared roadmap for the transition period, a documented foundation for the incoming Board, and an executive team heading into a period of significant change feeling clearer, calmer and more aligned.
“We were in the middle of a major governance transition with a new Board starting in weeks, and we didn’t have a clear plan for our operational priorities. Olivia synthesised a huge amount of information into user-friendly, clear chunks of trackable work. It was exceptionally practical and exactly what we needed.
What I wasn’t expecting to value as much was the process itself. The workshops gave our executive team quarantined time to communicate, share, prioritise and work as a team – and that exercise was incredibly valuable in its own right.
Olivia is very different to other consultants I’ve worked with. She connected with what we actually needed and was practical about it. She understands the NFP environment and the unusual stresses that can be placed on small for-purpose organisations.
I’d recommend her without hesitation.
”