When Change Is the Work: A Conversation with Peggie Chan, Head of Change Management & Transformation at Ramboll

Undercurrents surfaces insights from leaders driving capacity-building
and performance improvement beyond traditional L&D
to explore where learning happens and where it’s headed.

By Mark Britz

When you talk with someone whose responsibility is to spend their days helping thousands of people adapt to new systems and new ways of working, you quickly realize something about change management: It’s not an adjacent field to learning; it’s a continuation of it.

That’s how I felt when I spoke with Peggie Chan, Ramboll’s head of change management & transformation for their global environment & health business.

Ramboll is a global engineering, architecture, and consulting company with over 18,000 employees. Ramboll thrives in complexity. In their environment & health division alone, more than 3,000 employees across 22 countries navigate shifting regulations, technical demands, and rapid digital transformation. Change isn’t an exception; it’s the norm.

Peggie’s career reflects this reality. She started in strategic HR and talent development roles, transitioned into L&D and organizational effectiveness, and eventually found herself doing change work full time—not because she sought a new specialty, but because the work required it.

“Projects weren’t failing because of a lack of training,” she told me. “People were seeking clarity, alignment, communication, and support. They needed someone paying attention to their employee experience on the receiving end of the change.”

That was her pivot point, the moment she realized that change management wasn’t separate from learning. It was learning, just upstream, more expansive, and often messier when getting started.

The Work Before the Work

One theme that came up repeatedly was the importance of readiness. Before any training is built, before communications are drafted, Peggie wants to understand how the change will impact people and what barriers stand in their way.

She described using a Business Impact Assessment, a tool she’s refined over several years and put into practice during major initiatives, such as post-merger integrations for newly acquired firms, ERP rollouts, legal-entity consolidations, and more. It’s not a checklist but rather a template for a structured conversation with the business that proactively surfaces potential friction before it becomes resistance.

“When you understand who’s affected and how deeply, everything else becomes clearer during planning and implementation,” she explained. “Training becomes more relevant. Communication becomes timely. Leaders know how to help their teams.”

It reminded me of something L&D professionals often say but can struggle to be invited to do—be at the table… early. In Peggie’s world, early involvement is a requirement, one that Ramboll fully embraces.

Where Leaders Fit In

Peggie spends just as much time with leaders as she does with project teams. Not to “train” them, but to help them understand and prepare for the behavioral and emotional landscape of change.

“Employees don’t decide whether a change matters by reading an email,” she said. “They decide by engaging with leaders they trust and respect.”

She helps leaders shape messages, anticipate questions, and prepare themselves for the role they have in adoption. Sometimes that means coaching them on expectations, both in the short term and long term. Sometimes it’s guiding them through their own uncertainty. Often, it’s simply giving them language they can use confidently in conversations with their own teams and clients.

This struck me as a space where L&D skills really translate—facilitating alignment, coaching leaders, clarifying expectations, and designing communication.

It’s a Journey, Not an Event

In Peggie’s view, change isn’t a launch date. It’s a journey with multiple touchpoints: awareness, understanding, trial, adoption, and reinforcement. Training may be one of those touchpoints, but not the only one. The real work is creating a coherent experience that helps people move through each stage without getting stuck.

She shared how, during a major systems change, her team built reinforcement guides, hands-on support structures, and leader tool kits. The emphasis is on pace over perfection, and creating pragmatic, practical resources tailored to how people actually think and work.

Listening to her describe this, I couldn’t help but think how often L&D is asked to “train” a change that hasn’t been communicated, accepted, or even properly defined. Change management, at its core, exists to prevent exactly that scenario.

Where L&D & Change Management Meet

As we talked, it became clear that Peggie sees an enormous overlap between the two disciplines.

“L&D professionals already understand adult learning, behavior, communication, and facilitation,” she said. “Those are key strengths that make someone effective in change management.”

What shifts is the mindset and moving from:

• delivering programs to enabling adoption and culture changes
• supporting projects late to shaping them early
• content to conditions
• artifacts to impact

She emphasized that people coming from L&D don’t need to reinvent themselves. They just need to broaden their perspective.

“You already know how to help people learn,” she pointed out. “Change management is helping people get better at accepting changes. Those two things are far more connected than most people realize.”

A Future Built on Continuous Change

We also talked about AI and the pace of digital transformation. Peggie doesn’t see AI as a “project” in the traditional sense.

“It’s not one change. It’s a stream of emerging and evolving changes,” she said. “It’s critical to ensure we provide people with continuous communication, continuous clarity, continuous support.”

In other words, the future isn’t episodic change; it’s constant adaptation. And that future will require roles that blend learning, transformation, communication, adoption, and human-centered design.

Where L&D Professionals Can Begin

Near the end of our conversation, Peggie shared what she thinks L&D professionals can do if they’re curious about change management—either leaning into it or learning from it to strengthen their current role.

It wasn’t a course recommendation or a certification. It was simpler: She encourages people to insert themselves into the business through planning meetings, volunteering to assess impacts, and becoming curious about readiness for the organization and specific target audiences. These small actions signal a shift from “trainer” to “business partner.”

And once you start seeing the broader landscape that includes communication, alignment, leadership behavior, workflow changes, it’s hard to unsee it.

The Undercurrent

Talking with Peggie left me with a clear sense that change management is not a departure from L&D; it’s more of an expansion. Change management in many ways is behavior change in context and influence at the systemic level.

And that was the final point she made—Peggie has no authority in the traditional hierarchical sense of the word. Her work is not “pushed” upon anyone. She leads with value, a strong understanding of the psychology of change, the ability to really listen, and a career built on helping people grow. In doing so, she effectively “pulls” in people who are in need of her guidance and support.

For L&D professionals who want more impact, more visibility, and more strategic partnership, change management may be the future they haven’t yet considered. Today, many organizations face constant transformation. The work ahead isn’t just about learning new things. It’s about changing how we work—and people like Peggie are showing what it looks like when change becomes the work.