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.

Here's what's inside that session, and how the ninety minutes is spent.

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 structure

There are five segments. They're not strict - the conversation moves where it moves - but the rhythm is reliable.

Minutes 0–10 - Settle and reset. Coffee, small talk, the brief catch-up on the agency's recent work. The purpose of this segment is to lower the meeting-energy: nobody opines well in formal posture. The first few minutes are deliberately not part of the session - they're the warm-up.

Minutes 10–35 - The big prompts. Three or four open questions, each designed to surface an opinion. The exact prompts depend on the agency, but the form is the same:

• "What do you find yourself saying to clients in pitch meetings that you've never written down?"
• "What's the most common piece of conventional industry wisdom that you think is wrong?"
• "What's a decision the team made on a recent piece of work that you'd defend in public?"
• "If you could only convince other agencies of one thing this year, what would it be?"

The first answer to each of these is rarely the real one. The second one is closer. The third is usually it.

Minutes 35–60 - Drilling into the strongest one. By minute 35, the room has surfaced a candidate that feels alive - usually one specific opinion that the person voicing it has been waiting to say. We stop and drill. Why? What's the evidence? Who would argue against this and what would they say? What would you point at as proof if a client asked you to back it up?

This is the part of the session that does most of the work. The opinion gets clearer. The evidence gets named. The counter-arguments get visible. By the end of the drill, the opinion exists as a paragraph, not a sentence.

Minutes 60–80 - The other candidates. The remaining opinions surfaced in the first hour get a shorter version of the same treatment. Each gets two or three minutes of drilling. Not all of them survive - some collapse into "yeah, fair", which is fine. The ones that survive become next month's cornerstones.

Minutes 80–90 - The lede. Last ten minutes. We draft the opening sentence of the cornerstone piece in the room, on the screen, with everyone watching. This is the most efficient editing pass in the session. Whoever's voicing the opinion sees their words landing on the page in real time and corrects what doesn't sound like them. By minute 90, the lede is good enough to start the piece from.

The note-taking discipline

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

A live note-taker captures three columns:

• Opinions - short, defensible sentences in the speaker's words.
• Evidence - the work, data, references and anecdotes attached to each opinion.
• Quotables - sentences spoken in the room that should appear verbatim in the eventual piece, marked with the speaker's initials.

After the session, the recording is transcribed. The transcript is the source for the eventual cornerstone, the social atoms, and the byline pitches. The note doc is the working brief; the transcript is the truth.

Why ninety minutes

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. If we ran two hours, the post-session writing would be worse, not better.

Fortnightly is the cadence because the writing-and-deployment cycle for a single cornerstone is roughly two weeks: write, edit, atomise, publish, schedule socials, repeat. Weekly sessions overload the engine; monthly sessions starve it.

What the founders/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. That's mostly mine to set up in the first ten minutes.

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's 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's at least worth a working session for the agency considering it.