At a certain point in the proceedings, I notice a five-year-old kid sitting at the conference table, eating pizza and raising his hand to answer quiz questions like everyone else. What the — ?! Turns out it’s Cody LaPlante, son David LaPlante, the CEO of Twelve Horses. Cody is a full-on player. He jumps into the scene and plays the game 100%, even when there are 35 other grown-up players in the scene. For a kid, what’s not to understand about playing a game, right? Everyone’s ambition should be to engage in the world as unconditionally as a five-year-old. Cody’s support gives a definite lift to the group as a whole. He adds fun and lightheartedness to the scene.

Two weeks ago, I get a post on my Facebook wall that Cody is the star of the new Modest Mouse “Little Motel” music video. Sweet. Check it out It’s operatic.

It is the socially networked nature of Twelve Horses that it grooves on moves made by a five-year-old. The Modest Mouse video made the local papers in Reno and the Twelve Horses network lit up with the news. Personal blogs and personal branding, flex time, Facebooking, Twittering, Flickr Groups, local fund-raising events — and GameChangers workshops! — are all part of ongoing conversations the company conducts with itself, and with the Networked World. For Twelve Horses, social networking is not just an area of commercial expertise, it also helps employees foster the group mind that is essential for any team to perform at its best.

David LaPlante, a mountain kid who grew up in Crested Butte, Colorado, and attended the University of Nevada Reno where he skied with the best of them, is a very bright marketer and a savvy navigator of the Networked World. He and Martin Gastanaga, also a world-class skier, partnered in 1995 in a company they originally called Aztech Cyberspace. Steve Spencer, who manages the company’s Salt Lake City-based development team, became a partner in 2002. Today, after gyrating like an X-Games biker to survive the dotcom bubble, Twelve Horses is poised to prosper as business enters the era of social networking.

GameChangers has given a name, brought added depth and turned into a practiced discipline what was already in the Twelve Horses DNA. Gastanaga, the company’s COO, who studied improv theater in college, is himself such a strong and animated improviser that he could perform with most improv theater groups. I asked him recently why improvisation matters to Twelve Horses.

“So much of it is about finding a beat and going with it, keeping the scene moving, asking and answering,” he says. “If you pay attention and find a way to keep participating, you’ll have new conversations, meet new people, and learn things you didn’t know. It’s the same as the give-and-take of the stage.”

I asked him how improvisation made a difference to Twelve Horses’ clients. “We have become much better listeners,” he says. “I don’t go into meetings with canned presentations. I am there first to listen. To see where I can interject. To find a game that’ll lead to everybody winning.”

Gastanaga calls one of his favorite client games Wouldn’t It Be Cool To Have…? “It gets people engaged in the process, in collaborating,” he explains. When I questioned if this game might turn into a dreaded case of ‘Scope Creep’, he pointed out that, just as in improv theater, “not all the new information given in a scene has to be acted on in that scene. It can be a really great ‘callback’ in another scene, an up-sell farther on down the line.”

“I had to walk a client through a contract this week,” relates Gastanaga. “There were some new players on the client side and I had to bring them up to speed. I projected the contract on the screen, but I didn’t let the screen become the center of attention (this was the focus of several workshops I conducted with Twelve Horses). I got animated. I stood up. Walked around the room. Leaned against the wall. I was aware of my facial expressions. I did everything I could to bring that contract to life. This communicated a couple of important things to the client. First, that this was not about a piece of paper, it was about a relationship between people. Second, I wasn’t going to drag them through the details, I was going to invite them into the process, I was saying to them, ‘Let’s get through this together.’ And I think the client came away with a lot better understanding of the big picture, that the contract was just one aspect of an ongoing business relationship.” Gastanaga’s move was a strong one because it lifted the scene out of the status quo and into an area where a ‘new conversation’ could occur. And within that new conversation, new possibilities for the scene.

Last year at the company holiday party, Gastanaga took suggestions from audience and performed (solo!) different scenes from the year at Twelve Horses. This year, we’re talking about getting everyone at the party doing some kind of improvisation. Thunnnnnnnnderdome!