Our Team

Adrian Chan

Head of Research

Adrian, a PhD-qualified organisational psychologist, has led culture transformations in the Singapore Armed Forces and the Bhutanese government. Now, as Chief Product Officer at Cadence Culture, he applies his expertise in leadership, psychometrics, and organisational change to help businesses thrive.

Specialisation:
• Leadership & Psychology
• Research & Impact Analysis
• Learning Pedagogies

Certifications:
• PhD in Management, focusing on Leadership Development
• Organisational Psychologist – former chief psychologist for leadership development in SAFTI Military Institute
• Leadership Resource Person in His Majesty’s Secretariat, Kingdom of Bhutan
• Member of American Psychological Association
• Member of Facilitation Network of Singapore
• Certified in Kirkpatricks’ 4 levels of training evaluation
• Certified in MBTI
• FIRO-B

Adrian has a PhD in Management. His dissertation explored how different ways of reflecting on crucible experiences caused leaders to flourish or flounder. An organizational psychologist and a psychometrician by training, Adrian is a scientist-practitioner who loves to develop and implement research-based, empirically-proven tools and processes for leaders to develop themselves and others. Throughout his career, Adrian has created and contextualized many psychometric tools for different clients. As an author, Adrian has contributed to books, published in peer-reviewed outlets and maintained a personal blog at adriansays.com. As a public speaker, Adrian has engaged audiences on a wide range of topics such as resilience and mental health, education, leadership, organizational transformation and spiritual formation.

Adrian is intimately familiar with culture. He served 22 years as a military psychologist in MINDEF/SAF, where he was called upon for culture change interventions at various levels in the organization. He retired as the chief psychologist role in the SAF Centre for Leadership Development, which was instrumental in catalyzing several leadership and culture transformations initiatives in the SAF. He next assumed a 6-year assignment as the Leadership Resource Person in His Majesty’s Secretariat, Kingdom of Bhutan, where he also served concurrently as the Resident Founding Faculty in the Royal Institute of Governance and Strategic Studies, a leadership think tank and training institute for Bhutan’s best and brightest. These overseas stints in Bhutan exposed him to spearheading change in a cross-cultural environment.

Testimonials

“Adrian was an excellent facilitator; a good listener and he is able to steer discussions into topics which the team would like to reflect upon.”

“Adrian is the best. He gave us context for situations for when to give feedback. In particular, I found the concept of contracting to create a feedback culture (ie. establishing intentional norms to structure a process to give and receive feedback between two parties to be very helpful”

“He was able to put together very broad conversation topics into meaningful takeaways and was good at delivering key messages, turning the compulsory activities into something actually useful”

“Adrian was able to adapt to the needs of the group and prioritized that during the sessions while still managing to complete the objectives of each session”

“Adrian read the energy and interest of the room well and was sensitive and helped to draw lessons for us by also bringing his own experiences into the conversations”

“Adrian was insightful, able to deepen discussions, provide helpful frameworks for thinking about various issues and draw out perspectives from members.”