The 90 minutes that powers a fortnight of content

A working session is ninety minutes with the people inside an agency who carry the real opinions, and an interviewer whose job is to extract them.

It doesn't look like a brainstorm. It looks more like a structured interview, in the friendliest sense. The deliverable isn't a list of "content ideas" - it's a handful of clearly-stated opinions that the agency's senior people are willing to put their name to in print.

What a working session is for

Most agency thought leadership fails at the input stage. People sit down to write a piece without having decided what they think - so they end up writing what sounds plausible instead of what's true.

A working session inverts that. The thinking happens in the room, with prompts. The writing happens afterwards, from notes. The piece that's eventually published is the transcript-edited version of a real opinion, not the plausible-sounding-keyboard version.

Practically, this means the session produces three things:

1. A list of candidate opinions - short sentences, each defensible, each specific enough that not everyone in the industry would agree.
2. Supporting evidence - the work, the data, the references, the personal experience that each opinion rests on.
3. The first lede - usually the opening sentence of the eventual cornerstone, drafted in the session, captured verbatim.

A good session produces four to six candidate opinions and one near-publishable lede. A great one produces eight to ten, of which two are obvious cornerstone pieces.

The shape of the ninety minutes

The rhythm of the session is deliberate. It starts by lowering the meeting-energy, because nobody opines well in formal posture. It moves through open prompts designed to surface conventional wisdom first, contrarian opinion second, defensible-under-pressure opinion third. It drills into whichever candidate feels alive by the middle of the hour, and comes out the other side with a lede drafted on the screen with everyone watching.

The specific prompts, the exact segment lengths, and the interviewer's response to whichever answer surfaces first in each segment - that is the part that decides whether the session produces a publishable cornerstone or a transcript of interesting-sounding sentences that don't become anything. The prompts change with the agency and with what the founder has already published, and they change with what the interviewer has already learned in the first thirty minutes. It is not a script.

The first answer to any of the big prompts is rarely the real one. The second one is closer. The third is usually it. Getting to the third answer without pressuring the room is the interviewer's job, and it is more of the work than it looks like.

The note-taking discipline

The session is recorded with consent. The recording is the source of truth.

A live note-taker captures three things: the opinions in the speaker's own words, the evidence attached to each, and any sentences worth quoting verbatim in the eventual piece. After the session, the transcript is the source for the cornerstone, the social atoms, and the byline pitches. The note doc is the working brief; the transcript is the truth.

The move that most agencies get wrong when they try this themselves is confusing the two. The transcript is what the seniors actually said. The note doc is what they meant. Both are needed. The cornerstone is written from both.

Why ninety minutes, and why fortnightly

Less than ninety, and the third-answer rule doesn't have time to work. The first hour mostly surfaces conventional wisdom; the real opinions arrive in the last thirty minutes.

More than ninety, and the energy dies. The session needs to end with momentum, not exhaustion.

Fortnightly is the cadence because the write-and-deploy cycle for a single cornerstone is roughly two weeks. Weekly sessions overload the engine; monthly sessions starve it.

What the founders and seniors need to bring

Almost nothing. The session works best when the participants haven't prepared. Preparation in this context produces meeting-shaped answers - the polished version, not the real one.

The only thing they need to bring is permission to be honest. Setting that up in the first ten minutes is mostly the interviewer's job, and it is the part of the session that determines everything else. Every agency has a slightly different version of "the sentence the founder has been waiting to say", and finding it in ninety minutes is a job that gets easier the second and third time round - which is the argument for a working relationship, rather than a one-off.

What this looks like at They Said

This is the engine we run for every client programme. It's also the engine that produced this post - the lede was drafted in a working session three weeks ago, the structure was bricked out from the notes, the first draft was the transcript edited, and the second draft was the cuts.

That is the proof point. If the method makes the marketing pages clearer, the journal sharper and the LinkedIn feed more readable for the agency that built it, it is at least worth a working session for the agency considering it. Drop us a line.