Cynthia Payne

Managing Director & Founder

Anchor Excellence

Cynthia Payne is Founder and Managing Director of Anchor Impact Group, established in 2018, and brings more than 30 years of executive leadership experience and over 25 years as a Director across not-for-profit and for-profit boards. Through Anchor Excellence, Anchor Policy, Anchor Academy, SAGE Study Tours and Impactful-Leaders, Cynthia and her team have worked across more than 45% of the Australian aged care market, supporting residential aged care, home care, NDIS and retirement living organisations. Cynthia holds an MBA and Bachelor of Applied Science in Nursing and is a Certified Aged Care Board Advisory Chair and Certified Practitioner in Team Management Systems and Balanced Scorecard. She is a Member of the AICD and Fellow of Governance Institute of Australia. Cynthia currently serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director of PainChek and Director of Abergeldie Complex Infrastructure. She was named among CEO Magazine’s Top 15 Women of Influence in 2025 in Australia.

Board Culture Matters: Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight

C6 – Governance and Organisational Culture

25 November 2026

2.45pm – 3.15pm

Precis

In a rapidly evolving aged care environment, effective governance is more than a compliance checklist. It depends on how clearly the Board sets direction, how confidently the CEO leads, how effectively management executes, and whether difficult information can move through the organisation without being filtered or softened.

This session explores the cultural and practical conditions that help Boards move from oversight to genuine performance stewardship. Drawing on evidence-informed governance practice and sector experience, it introduces three critical lines of sight:

Hindsight: Using lagging indicators such as National Quality Indicators and complaint trends as diagnostic tools to identify root causes, organisational patterns and opportunities for sustained improvement.
Insight: Moving beyond polished board reports to understand what is really happening across services. This includes using RAG dashboards, Quality Care Advisory Bodies and Consumer Advisory Bodies to triangulate information, supported by a culture of psychological safety where concerns, dissenting views and emerging risks can be raised openly.
Foresight: Shifting the strategic conversation from “Can we?” to “Should we?” by anticipating cultural, clinical and organisational risks before they crystallise, and considering decisions through the lens of rights, quality and long-term sustainability.

What Delegates Will Learn and Apply

The Circular Discipline of Governance: How Board, CEO and management roles connect to create a clear line of sight from strategy to service delivery.
Hindsight, Insight and Foresight: How the three lenses can move Boards from reactive oversight to proactive stewardship.
The S.T.A.I.R. Framework: Introducing this proprietary five-element framework (Support, Time, Alignment, Inspiration, Results) designed to bridge the gap between rigorous regulatory compliance and a thriving, person-centered performance culture.
Building Director Capability: Practical, actionable strategies for Directors to empower their executive teams. We will discuss how to foster a culture of psychological safety where diverse perspectives are welcomed, enabling robust decision-making that meets the demands of the Aged Care Act 2024.

This session is a call to action for Directors to look beyond compliance and ask a harder question: what evidence tells us that governance is genuinely working, and translating into better outcomes for older Australians?