Bodily movement is ephemeral and illusive. Consider a simple action, like lifting the right arm overhead. At the beginning, as the right arm hangs by the side, there is stillness. At the ending when the arm arrives overhead, there is another momentary stillness. But the actual movement, the process of raising the arm, disappears even as it is happening.

Dance, the movement art par excellence, exists at a perpetual vanishing point. Yet, there is order and pattern to dance. The ballerina takes three steps to the right, then three steps to the left, turns and pauses. Here is a pattern, established by the repetition of certain kinds of actions.

There is also a pattern in the everyday movements that accompany speech. These patterns are more diffuse, since they occur spontaneously and without choreographic planning. Nevertheless, a perceptive observer watching someone converse will begin to see that certain movements recur. These repeated actions can be thought of as a kind of nonverbal signature, one that is uniquely characteristic.

This nonverbal signature consists of all kinds of bodily actions – postures, gestures, and posture-gesture mergers. Management consultant Warren Lamb became particularly interested in Posture-Gesture Mergers because he discerned that these body movements were more genuinely expressive than postures and gestures.

Just as individuals are distinct in terms of physical appearance and vocal quality, Lamb found that each person has a unique Posture-Gesture Merger pattern. Identifying this pattern allowed Lamb to predict not only how well a candidate would fit a particular position, but also the extent to which he/she would find the nature of work satisfying. His findings were consistent with the initial discoveries made by Rudolf Laban and F.C. Lawrence. I discuss their discoveries in the next blog.

A Posture-Gesture Merger refers to a movement in which the dynamic effort quality and/or shape change is consistent through the body as a whole. Warren Lamb first identified Posture-Gesture Mergers as significant phrases in the ongoing stream of bodily movements that accompany speech. As he observed, “It’s not just Posture and Gesture but the merging element of the two which is the crux of the matter.”

Posture-Gesture Mergers (PGMs) are significant for the following reasons:
1. Unlike static postures, PGMs are dynamic physical actions.
2. Unlike isolated gestures, PGMs are relatively intense in terms of the degree of bodily involvement.
3. Unlike postures and gestures, which can be consciously controlled, PGMs occur spontaneously and are difficult to replicate intentionally.
4. Although PGMs are spontaneous expressions, they recur in patterns that are individually characteristic. Moreover, the PGM pattern is a relatively enduring feature of a person’s movement.

The significance of Posture-Gesture Mergers gave Lamb the key for which he had been looking. Now he had an objective way to discern the candidate’s authentic movement expressions. In my next blog, I discuss how Lamb used this key to unlock the meaning in the individual candidate’s movement patterns.

In his early days as a management consultant, Warren Lamb frequently helped client companies appoint employees. He would be called in to interview a short-list of people being considered for a position. His assessment, based upon the candidates’ movement patterns, would be used, in addition to other measures, to find the right person for the job.

Lamb was aware that some people simply come across better in an interview than others. They are able to manage the image they create adroitly, in part through their nonverbal behaviors. The candidate can assume a self-confident posture and make the firm gestures of a strong leader for the duration of the interview – without actually being a strong and confident leader.

Thus Lamb had to be able to discern artificial movement behaviors, temporarily put on to create a good impression, from actions that were genuine and truly characteristic of the individual.

To do so, he had to shift his analysis beyond static poses and isolated gestures and focus on dynamic actions. In carefully observing the ongoing stream of movement that accompanies speech, Lamb made an important discovery. He began to notice that some gestures merged into action involving the whole body, and vice versa. These phrases of posture-gesture merger occurred spontaneously and naturally as coherent physical expressions. Lamb had found the key to discerning genuine and characteristic actions from “body language” that can be faked.

As he notes, “We can relatively easily change gestures… we can easily work on bad posture. But it seems that if we cannot change the quality of movement at the point where gestures merge into posture, or vice versa, then it has a particular significance.”

In the next blog, I will discuss the particular significance of the merging of posture and gesture.