Agile, Creativity, and Learning Through Stories and Experiences – Exclusive Interview With Paul Lister
- Aug 25, 2025
- 6 min read
Paul Lister blends creativity and coaching in a way that stands out. With a background in writing, filmmaking, and game design, he brings storytelling and fresh perspectives to Agile and Scrum training. In this exclusive interview, Paul shares his journey and how he helps teams learn, adapt, and thrive.
Paul Lister, Agile Coach
Who is Paul Lister at home and in business?
Restless! I basically have more hobbies than sense. I’m a writer and have finished three novels and an anthology of short stories. I am currently working on a fourth novel and about to publish another anthology. I also make short horror films (the last one, Practice (2024), and we are in pre-production for our current effort Forget Me Knots). In case that was not enough, I am developing a board game called Charge, a sort of cross between chess and poker. So occasionally I get to do the normal human things like travel and, what’s it called again? Ah, yes, relaxing!
With regards to my work life, I mostly feel like a translator. I specialise in Agile Coaching and Scrum training. These are non-traditional workflows focusing on minimising risk. But it’s really about finding ways for people to understand the value of such methodologies and frameworks for them.
What makes your Certified Scrum Master course different from others out there?
I have a certain philosophy when it comes to learning, one that I developed (mostly through trial and error) during my time at Cambridge whilst working on my Physics PhD. And it’s pretty simple. I came up with a method that I describe with the acronym ‘CoMeT,’ which represents:
Concept: Understand the underlying ideas
Methodology: Learn functionally how something works
Tools: Get to grips with any things you need to use to make the methodology work
I combine this with a hierarchy of memory. If you feel emotion about something, you tend to remember it. Pictures and stories are a better learning tool than just text. And finally, ‘doing’ is better than being told.
Hence, my Certified Scrum Course utilises these ideas. I use the Socratic method, letting learners explore ideas before I debrief them. The course uses games and visuals to explain the ideas of Scrum. I even have an exercise regarding the Agile Manifesto that is deliberately designed to frustrate the students, so that they explain to me how the process I forced them to follow could be made better. They end up explaining Agility to me before I have taught them anything! And again, the emotion of such an exercise will aid with recall later.
What are the most common challenges teams face when shifting to Agile, and how do you help them overcome those?
Patterns and habits. Often, organisations will move people from existing roles to the accountabilities in a Scrum team without a proper understanding of how they differ. It is human nature to do what you already know to complete a task if you have not been taught a different way. So I make sure that Scrum teams are not just instructed in ‘what’ they should do, but also ‘why’ the ‘what’ exists.
With regards to patterns, organisations try to fit frameworks like Scrum into existing infrastructures, such as departments, hierarchies, and interaction rules. For example, Scrum wants the team to interact directly with stakeholders, not through a client manager. Scrum teams are self-managing and hence hold themselves accountable. Often, individual disciplines in Scrum teams have their own manager and take problems to them instead of dealing with issues ‘in-house’ in retrospectives.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about Agile or Scrum?
The biggest misconception about Agile is not understanding what it is! Only a few months ago, I was talking to an executive, and they thought it was ‘that thing where you do what you like.’ Agile is a way of mitigating risks, both known and unknown, and being able to pivot with minimal cost when those risks are realised. Another misconception is that Agile is a framework or methodology itself. The Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles are an overview of the ideas that came before it, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean.
The biggest misconception about Scrum is that it is just a series of events and roles that need to be enacted. If a team member doesn’t have a mindset that conforms to the Scrum values and the theory (transparency leading to inspection and potential adaptation) always present in the background of their thinking, then it will not work. It is a framework and, like any framework, if you remove pieces of it, the rest will come tumbling down.
A smaller but ever-popular misconception about Scrum is that it is the holy grail of frameworks. It was designed to be used, as stated in the Scrum Guide, in complex environments. In this context, ‘complex’ means that you need feedback to understand what is needed or experimentation on how to create it. It can be used in simpler regimes, but then it’s like using a sledgehammer to knock in a drawing pin.
How do storytelling, writing, and film influence your work as an Agile coach?
Before there was the printed word, history was passed on verbally, often through the medium of cautionary tales. I mentioned learning and memory earlier, and one of the aids to this is storytelling. Jokes are funny because of the whole joke being told. No one laughs at just a punchline. In the coaching world, the punchline is the idea you want to get across.
For example, I often talk about the Lean idea of only doing something when you need to. The story I tell goes something like this:
“When I was a fledgling Scrum Master, I saw that a Product Owner was writing hundreds of Product Backlog items. I knew we would only need about ten of those for the next two sprints, and so mentioned it to them.
‘Oh, Paul, you idiot. This is a five-year project. We are definitely going to need them.’
Two weeks later, another company bought our organisation. They already had the functionality we were building, and hence the project was redundant.”
With writing, you are always trying to get ideas across with as much brevity as possible, but still accessible to your audience. Brevity is important because it involves that precious commodity that seems to escape us all: time. I run a two-day Certified Scrum Master (CSM) Course for the Scrum Alliance, and this is about the right amount of time to both instill and practise the ideas inherent in the framework. But sometimes I only have a day or an hour to do the same, so learning that ‘idea shortcut’ brevity is particularly useful.
In fact, I even made a short animated video called Scrum in Sixty Seconds, which hopefully did what it said on the tin.
Filmmaking is all about perspective, about what angle you are telling the story from. Sometimes, the point of view (POV) is important. Some training courses, for instance, are a one-way street. It’s a ‘push’ system, as we say in the trade, i.e., the learners are only receiving the information that the trainer gives them. To some extent, this is always going to be the case, but there are times when it becomes a ‘pull’ system. Sometimes, a student may offer comments or questions based on their experience, and an inexperienced coach or trainer may try to sideline them. But this is just a change of POV. It is important to listen and see if there is a teaching point that can be taken from their point of view. In true Agile style, I have even changed my own course based on some of these discussions.
What’s your mission when someone joins one of your courses or coaching sessions?
To give the ‘WOW’ factor. I don’t mean here that they should find the coaching amazing (although that’s always a bonus!). WOW is a combination of Why and hOW. If you just explain the ‘what’ of things, the knowledge pertaining to a method, it does not necessarily mean you can execute that method.
For instance, being a physicist, I can explain to you the mechanics of striking a football in such a way that it will bend from a free kick. But with the best will in the world, that is not going to make you, or me, Ronaldo. So it is important to show people how to do things, not just what they are. This is the reason I always have a simulation of some kind in my courses or coaching, in order that people learn to utilise the knowledge.
I am hoping the ‘Whys’ cause collateral thinking. If learners understand the theoretical foundation to a piece of a framework, then they may be able to use that for adjacent work, or even in their everyday lives.
I was speaking to an ex-student the other day who had changed the way they shopped, prioritising the items they really needed over the luxuries. I asked why they were telling me this, and they said that the last time they went to the supermarket in question, there was a fire alarm, but luckily they managed to get through the tills with the small number of vital items that they really needed. Lean in action.
Or, of course, that was all a fiction just to make a point.
I am a storyteller after all.
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