The Signature Question: How Culture Actually Spreads

It was 2:15 on a Wednesday. The meeting room on level 6 was doing that thing Bangkok meeting rooms do when twelve people have been breathing in them for forty minutes — the aircon fighting a losing battle against body heat and ambition, the faint sweetness of someone’s Thai iced tea mixing with dry-erase marker fumes from a whiteboard nobody had wiped down since morning. The presenter had just hit slide fourteen, the one with the optimistic revenue projections and the hand-wavy implementation timeline, and was riding that particular confidence that comes from a room full of nodding heads. Then Rob leaned forward in his chair — the vinyl creaking slightly the way office chairs do on those hard floors — and asked four words that sucked the oxygen out of the room: “How are you testing that?”

The presenter’s hand hovered over the clicker. Somewhere behind me, a laptop lid clicked softly shut, the way you close a book when you realise you’ve been reading the wrong chapter. That silence — the heavy, humid, loaded kind that settles between a question and the dawning realisation that you don’t have a good answer — that’s not awkwardness. That’s culture being installed, one uncomfortable moment at a time.

As the organisational psychologist Edgar Schein wrote, “The most powerful mechanisms that founders, leaders, and managers have available for communicating what they believe in or care about is what they systematically pay attention to.” Not what they email. Not what they print on posters. What they ask, repeatedly, in the rooms where decisions get made.

We love to believe culture comes from documents. Mission statements crafted during offsite retreats. Values printed on lanyards. DNA manifestos rendered in seventy-two-point font and pinned to every floor’s kitchen wall. And look, there’s nothing wrong with writing those things down — clarity matters. But if you think a document is doing the heavy lifting of culture change, you’re confusing the menu with the meal.

Culture doesn’t get rolled out. It gets repeated into existence.

One Question, One Leader

When I started at Agoda, leadership was pushing hard to build an experimentation culture. Not experimentation in the vague Silicon Valley sense of “move fast and break things,” but genuine, rigorous, data-driven validation. A/B testing as a default, not an afterthought.

And the way it took root wasn’t through a manifesto, a training programme, or an all-hands presentation with thirty slides about the scientific method.

It was through a question. The same question. Asked again and again and again.

Rob was in a lot of the meetings I attended in those early days. Product reviews, feature proposals, business presentations — it didn’t matter. Someone would present a plan, lay out the roadmap, explain the rationale. And Rob would ask:

“How are you testing that?”

Not “how are you QA-ing that.” Not “have you written unit tests.” How are you testing that hypothesis? How are you validating that assumption with data? Where’s the experiment?

Next meeting. Different team, different feature, different presenter. Same question.

“How did you test that?”

Again. And again. And again. Like a parrot that had learned the one phrase that actually mattered.

At first, the effect was purely defensive. People started preparing for the question because they knew it was coming. You’d see it in the way presenters would pre-emptively add a slide about their testing plan — not because they’d internalised the value of experimentation, but because they knew Rob was going to ask. It was self-preservation disguised as rigour.

But then something shifted.

Other people in those meetings started asking the same question. Not because Rob prompted them — because they’d heard it enough times that it had become part of their own thinking. The question migrated from one person’s habit to a room’s expectation. Engineers started asking it of each other in design reviews. Product managers — who were naturally strong at this — started building experimentation into their proposals before anyone had to ask. But here’s where it got interesting: it didn’t stop at the people writing code. Business teams started thinking in experiments. Even the call centre, when looking at internal process changes, started asking how they could A/B test different approaches rather than just rolling out whatever felt right. The question had escaped the engineering org entirely and infected people who’d never written a line of code in their lives.

Eventually, it stopped being Rob’s question entirely. It just became how we think here. The question had seeped into the groundwater. Nobody needed to be reminded anymore — it was habit, reflex, culture.

Yaron did something similar in the early days, though his question was aimed squarely at the IT organisation. His version was simpler, blunter, and just as relentless: “Does this scale?” and its close cousin, “How do you scale that?” — said again and again, in architecture reviews, in infrastructure discussions, in any room where a system was being designed. Two leaders at the same company, different domains, same technique. Same result.

The Three Phases of a Question Becoming Culture

What Rob and Yaron demonstrated, probably without a framework or a label for it, maps onto a pattern you can see in any organisation where culture actually shifts rather than just gets talked about.

Phase One: Defensive Compliance. People prepare for the question because they know it’s coming. They don’t believe in it yet — they’re just avoiding embarrassment. The testing slide gets added. The scalability section appears in the design doc. It’s compliance, not conviction. But it’s a start, because the behaviour comes before the belief. As the psychologist Albert Bandura’s research on observational learning demonstrated, people adopt behaviours they see modelled by authority figures — first mechanically, then genuinely. Attention comes because the questioner has authority. Retention comes because they hear it repeatedly. Reproduction is easy because the question is simple. Motivation comes because nobody wants to be caught without an answer.

Phase Two: Social Contagion. Others in the room start asking the same question. It migrates from one person’s habit to a group’s expectation. The original questioner no longer needs to be present — the pattern has been picked up by enough people that it sustains itself. This is where culture stops being a person and starts being an environment.

Phase Three: Ambient Culture. The question no longer needs a source. New hires absorb it through osmosis. It’s just “how we think here.” You can’t trace it back to a single person anymore because it’s become part of the collective operating system. This is the finish line — the point where culture is self-sustaining.

The coach Vince Lombardi understood this progression instinctively when he said, “Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” The behaviour you repeat is the culture you build, whether you intend it or not. Rob and Yaron chose their repetition deliberately. Most organisations leave it to chance.

Why One Question Works and Five Don’t

Here’s where most leadership teams get it wrong. They identify twelve cultural values, create a competency framework with behavioural indicators for each, and expect all of them to take root simultaneously. It’s the organisational equivalent of trying to form twelve new habits on January 1st.

Research on habit formation consistently shows that singular focus is what drives lasting change — it’s nearly impossible to change more than one thing at a time. If Rob had rotated between “How are you testing that?”, “What’s the ROI?”, “Have you checked with legal?”, and “Where’s the competitive analysis?” — none of them would have stuck. The power is in the monotony.

Jeff Bezos understood this. Amazon famously reserves an empty chair in every meeting to represent the customer, and Bezos has been reported to have cited “customer” over five hundred times across twenty-four shareholder letters, repeating the mission in nearly every public appearance. One signal. One obsession. Relentless consistency. That empty chair is the physical artifact; the repeated question — “what does the customer want?” — is the embedding mechanism that made customer obsession real rather than aspirational.

Your signature question works when four conditions are met. The person asking has positional authority and credibility — not because hierarchy is the point, but because people pay attention to what leaders attend to. The question is simple and universal, not domain-specific jargon that only half the room understands. It applies across contexts — product reviews, design reviews, business cases, all of them. And crucially, the leader never stops asking. Consistency over months, not weeks. The moment you stop, the signal fades.

The Question as a Filter

Here’s something nobody talks about: over time, the signature question doesn’t just change behaviour — it changes who thrives.

People who are naturally data-driven find themselves succeeding more in an environment where “how are you testing that?” is ambient. People who think in terms of scalability flourish when “does this scale?” is the question everyone’s asking. Those who aren’t wired that way either adapt — which is growth — or they self-select out. The question shapes the talent pool, not just the behaviour.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s alignment. Every organisation has an implicit filter for who succeeds and who struggles. The question just makes that filter explicit and intentional rather than arbitrary and political.

The Anti-Pattern: When Leaders Ask Everything and Embed Nothing

I’ve seen the opposite too. Leaders who genuinely care about culture but try to embed everything at once. Every meeting becomes a gauntlet of concerns — security, performance, accessibility, testing, documentation, cost, timeline, customer impact. Each one valid. None of them repeated with enough consistency to become reflex.

The result is a team that knows their leader has opinions about many things but doesn’t know what they actually care about most. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

As the management thinker Peter Drucker observed, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Trying to simultaneously embed ten cultural values is doing a lot of things efficiently. Picking one question and asking it until it becomes ambient — that’s doing the right thing.

Finding Your Signature Question

If you’re a leader reading this and thinking about what your signature question should be, here’s the uncomfortable truth: you probably already have one. It’s whatever you’re already asking most often. The problem is that for many leaders, their de facto signature question is something like “when will this be done?” or “what’s the status?” — questions that embed urgency and reporting culture rather than the values they actually want to cultivate.

The exercise isn’t inventing a clever question. It’s choosing which one thing you want to become reflexive in your organisation, and then finding the simplest question that forces people to think about it.

If you want quality culture: “What breaks if this goes wrong?” If you want customer empathy: “Who is this for, and have you talked to them?” If you want simplicity: “Can we do this in a simpler way?” If you want experimentation: “How are you testing that?” If you want scalability: “Does this scale?”

Pick one. Ask it in every meeting. Ask it when you already know the answer. Ask it when the team has clearly thought about it, because asking anyway reinforces that this is the standard, not the exception. Ask it for six months. Then twelve. Then just… keep asking.

You’ll know it’s working when someone else asks it and nobody remembers where it started.

The Bottom Line

Culture change doesn’t happen in documents. It doesn’t happen at offsites. It doesn’t happen in all-hands presentations or Slack channels dedicated to values and principles.

It happens in the question one leader asks so many times that it stops being their question and starts being everyone’s reflex. It happens in the awkward silence after someone realises they don’t have an answer. It happens when the presenter adds a slide before anyone asks, because the question is now part of how they think, not just how they present.

Edgar Schein had it right: culture is what leaders pay attention to. Not what they say they pay attention to. Not what the values poster claims. What they actually, consistently, repeatedly attend to in the moments that matter.

Your DNA document can say “we are a data-driven organisation” in seventy-two-point font. But one leader, asking the same question in every meeting for months on end, will do more to make that real than any document ever could.

So here’s my question for you: what’s your signature question? And more importantly — are you asking it enough?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a design review in ten minutes. And I already know what I’m going to ask.