Co-founder of Absolute Possibilities PLT | Executive Development | Environmental, Social, and Governance | Sustainable Development Goals
In May 2022, Aaron Chan lost his job. He had spent three months building a learning and development function from nothing, designing the framework, running two programmes, drafting a third for the following quarter. Then the company reorganised, and the role went with it. Within months he was leading People and Culture at another organisation. Within eighteen months he had run four rightsizing exercises affecting close to a third of its headcount.
The Engineer Who Went Looking for the Human Variable
Aaron Chan, CPC, STMP, SHRM-SCP, is Chief Behaviour Architect at Interlock & Infinity Sdn. Bhd. and co-founder of Absolute Possibilities PLT, based in Johor, Malaysia. He began his working life running a potable water treatment plant and now spends it persuading boardrooms that people obey the same rule as machinery. The unusual part is not that he pairs engineering with psychology, but how literally he means it.
Rasa, and the Question a Treatment Plant Cannot Answer
He trained as a chemical engineer at Universiti Sains Malaysia. In 2009 he took charge of production at Gamuda Water’s plant in Rasa, responsible for the daily potable water treatment process, the integrity of the process line, and compliance with the company’s integrated ISO systems. He had four technicians under him. He also built the development programme for the plant’s interns, which is the detail that gives away where he was heading.
Plants are honest. If the output is wrong, something upstream is wrong, and no amount of exhortation at the outlet will fix it. That logic followed him when he moved into Gamuda Engineering in 2013 to work on organisational development and talent, sitting as secretariat to the Senior Management Board and working on the scholarship committee. It followed him again through a master’s degree in Applied Psychology at HELP University, which he completed between 2014 and 2016 while holding a full-time role.
“My engineering background taught me that every system produces exactly what it is designed to produce.” Most people say something like this and mean it as encouragement. Chan means it as a diagnosis, and it makes him unusually reluctant to blame the people standing at the end of the line.
By 2017 he was Head of Learning and Development at the Gamuda Learning Centre, overseeing the design and renovation of the facility itself along with the curriculum inside it. He moved to Sunway Group in 2018, then to Sunway Medical Centre in 2019 as Senior Manager for Human Capital, where he redesigned the learning framework for leaders and carried the hospital’s people function through the years that followed. In 2021 he joined UOB as First Vice President for Talent Management and Organizational Then came the role he was headhunted away for. Four months in, the reorganization at his new employer reached his desk, and the letter with it. He worked the three months’ notice out and left at seven.
The People Who Stay
What he did next is the part that is difficult to fake. As head of People and Culture for a healthcare organisation’s Malaysian operation, and for six months its interim people lead in Singapore, Aaron Chan was handed four separate rightsizing exercises. Roughly 30 percent of headcount was affected.
“For me, rightsizing was never just about reducing costs. It was about ensuring the organisation could continue delivering on its purpose with the right structure and capabilities.” Every decision was tied to business need, role relevance, performance and future capability, and calibrated across the leadership team rather than left to any single manager’s preference. Managers were prepared before they walked into the conversations, not handed a script in the morning.
The measure he watched afterwards was not whether the restructuring closed on schedule. It was voluntary attrition among key talent, engagement, productivity, business continuity, and how quickly teams found their footing again.
“Many organisations focus on employees who leave, but the survivors also experience uncertainty and guilt.” He held team dialogues, reset expectations, and made room for the questions nobody puts in writing. The instinct is not administrative. It belongs to someone who has sat on the receiving end and remembers what the silence felt like.
In April 2024 he co-founded Absolute Possibilities, working with corporate clients on leadership pipelines, communication, change and resilience, and team performance. He arrived with an uncommon stack of credentials behind him: ICF certified coach, NLP trainer certified by the ABNLP, SHRM-SCP, Gallup Strengths coach, certified DISC and Hogan facilitator, LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator.
One engagement stands out. A leadership team had fractured after a major restructuring. Departments were pulling in different directions, communication had collapsed, and trust between the leaders had gone. By the end of a single session, the group had agreed shared priorities, settled who owned which decisions, and committed to specific cross-functional actions. In the months that followed, the organisation reported faster decision-making and more consistent messaging from its leaders. They also kept returning to what they had built in that room during later planning sessions, which is the harder result and the one Chan cares about.
“A great workshop is one people enjoy. A successful programme is one where people consistently behave differently months later.” He is equally direct about where culture actually comes from. “Culture isn’t built through values printed on a wall. It’s built by what leaders consistently reward, tolerate, and demonstrate every day.”
Since May 2026 he has held the title Chief Behaviour Architect at Interlock & Infinity Sdn. Bhd. It sounds invented until you trace the line back to Rasa.
What the Letter Taught Him
Most executives who cut 30 percent of a workforce describe the exercise in the language of necessity. Chan describes it in the language of the people still at their desks the following Monday, because four years earlier he was the one clearing his own. “Organisations rarely have a capability problem. They usually have behaviour and systems problems.” He says the most common mistake is treating the symptom, reading low engagement or resistance as the problem itself rather than the signal of something further upstream.
He knows what the decision costs, because it was once made about him. That is the qualification that never appears on the certificate list.
Aaron Chan, CPC, STMP, SHRM-SCP, is Chief Behaviour Architect at Interlock & Infinity Sdn. Bhd. and co-founder of Absolute Possibilities PLT, based in Johor, Malaysia. He works with organisations across Southeast Asia on leadership development, culture, and behaviour change, and coaches senior leaders through periods of restructuring and rapid growth. To connect with Aaron or learn more, visit www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-chan-ck.
