One thing I always notice when I’m in a scene with Mark Johnson–the founder and President of JiffyGas and HConverters, complementary brands in the business of converting internal combustion engines to run on alt energy (hydrogen, nat gas, biofuels)–is how observant he is.  He notices everything.  When you’re speaking, he watches your hands, he glances at your feet, he looks you in the eye, he focuses on your thoughts even as they’re still taking shape in your mind.  When he speaks, he speaks with much more than the words coming out of his mouth.  Mark Johnson’s kind of communicating transcends spoken language.  Yes, words communicate, but only on the Cosmetic level.  It’s what accompanies those words on the Emotional and Meta levels that has the power to change the game.

When Mark visited Los Angeles last month, and I got to watch Edwin and Armando, the whiz-bang mechanics he’d flown in from Colombia, convert a six-year-old Lexus to run on hydrogen, spoken language was maybe the least effective communications tool they used during the two days it took to do the conversion.   There were four languages being spoken in that shop in Alhambra–English, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian if you count the Italian narration on a DVD promo for the converter kit that Edwin ran for us on one of his computers.  Sure, some spoken language was required.  But what made the scene go–what got the team on the same page–in improvisation terms, what created the Group Mind–were the elements of communication that transcended words.   Here’s where Johnson’s genius as a communicator was clearly in evidence. (more…)