In my discussion of Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA) at the public lecture session in Montreal, I aimed to demonstrate how knowledge from the field of dance became relevant and valued in the business world.

After introducing the creators of MPA – Rudolf Laban, F.C. Lawrence, and Warren Lamb – I explained that body movement is different from body language.  Body language is based on interpreting gestures and fixed positions such as “crossed arms indicate rejection.”  In MPA, the meaning is in the movement.

In analyzing movement to assess individual decision making patterns, I explained that it is necessary to distinguish between two main categories of movement.  The first is gesture – an action isolated to a single part of the body.  An example is waving with only the hand.  Sometimes there are simultaneous isolated gestures – like the politician who was shaking hands with two different people while craning his neck forward to read a paper.  What do you get from these incongruous and empty motions?

Gestures are in contrast to actions that are consistent through the body as a whole.  Lamb called these integrated movements “Posture-Gesture Mergers.”  An example is a wave that animates the whole body.

Everyone has a distinctively different way of performing Posture-Gesture Mergers, and these patterns are linked with decision making.  What we have found is that successful teams – whether in business, personal relations, and sporting or artistic enterprises – are composed of people who act true to their own way of moving, neither trying to emulate someone else or merely making gestures.

Over the past 75 years, Movement Pattern Analysis has proven itself as one well-defined approach to the study of movement.  As a discipline, however, movement study is still in its infancy.  And like all babies, it has enormous potential.  We don’t yet know what it may be when it matures.  Find out more about the possibilities of movement analysis in the next blog.