Corporate coach Matt Smith knows that many folks participating in his training sessions are going to question what the sessions have to do with their job. Playing games, doing irreverent improv exercises- how is that going to help in a professional, straight-laced working environment? Though some in the corporate world might see them as pointless or childish, Smith said Scrum and agile development professionals understand what such exercises have to do with their jobs. "Oftentimes, you can equate these games to what's going on in Scrum," he said. 

Society dictates how people should act in various situations, and Smith calls that the "cringe mode." One of the exercises that Smith does to bring people out of that line of thinking is having everyone contort their bodies to an extent and introduce themselves to people they don't know in that position. That helps break the barrier of how people are expected to act. Smith equated this expected to behavior to when he went to an all-boys' Catholic high school. "Discipline was still ok, and teachers would still hit the kids sometimes," he said. "I made sure I wasn't the kid being hit, because when a teacher walked by me, I made sure to grimace and show pain as if I was studying. In studying, I'm expressing pain, so I'm already where the teacher needs me to be. So the teacher is going to go the guy in the front row whose relaxing and hit him.

"So I figured if I beat myself up just a little bit, say .002 decibels of pain, then I miss the 8.9 decibels of pain that Tom got in the front row. This ties back to working transparently, because we need to be able to let go of mistakes so we remain available and move on."