Celebrating Meaningful Movement Analysis

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Thirty-five individuals from across the nation and around the world gathered in Golden, Colorado over Memorial Day weekend to celebrate the life and work of movement analysis pioneer, Warren Lamb (1923-2014) at a seminar sponsored by Motus Humanus.

DSC00617Warren Lamb began his career under the tutelage of movement theorist Rudolf Laban and management consultant F.C. Lawrence.  Their ground-breaking work provided a basis for matching the movement traits of manual laborers to the motion factors of various factory jobs. Lamb took this work much further, to relate movement patterns to cognitive processes used in decision making at the managerial level. Over 400 companies worldwide utilized Lamb’s profiles work to select and build executive teams, with some firms employing this consulting approach continuously for three decades.

The weekend seminar sponsored by Motus Humanus incorporated sessions on Lamb’s key ideas. All the presenters were Registered Movement Pattern Analysts who had studied and worked with Lamb. Presenters included Laurie Cameron, Jagriti Chander, Alison Henderson, Charlotte Honda, Patricia Marek, James McBride, Beverly Stokes, and myself.

In addition, Motus Humanus recognized the contributions of Eden Davies with its new “Friend of Movement Study” award. Over the last 20 years, Davies has promoted Movement Pattern Analysis through writing, publishing, and other supportive efforts. The award was presented by Lamb’s daughter, Imogen Lamb, who traveled from Europe to attend the event, along with her sister Elizabeth and brother Tim Lamb.   A particular highlight was the impromptu talk Tim gave at the closing banquet in which he shared his perspective on growing up with a very unconventional father who even had an empty room in the family home dedicated to movement!

The Warren Lamb Legacy: Freedom through Movement Analysis

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In the weeks since movement pioneer Warren Lamb died at the age of 90, I have had many occasions to reflect Warren’s life, our friendship, and what Warren fashioned from the insights he garnered from Rudolf Laban.

Laban referred to movement as “man’s magic mirror.” Lamb found a way to capture what is reflected in movement and give it practical relevance. In doing so, he moved far, far beyond “body language.”

The Movement Pattern Analysis profile Lamb developed reveals a person’s unique motivational pattern. It shows what kind of challenges are stimulating, and what kinds of demands cause stress. Thus the profile enables the individual to grasp where his strengths lie and to find a situation to suit those strengths.

As one of Lamb’s clients recently wrote to me:
“I often think about my profile. It has helped me know what to get involved in and how to avoid pitfalls. If only I could have had it at 20 years old!”

Lamb himself summed up his legacy in the following way:
“Much of my life’s work has been dedicated to helping people become aware of their distinctive pattern of movement so that they can, truly, be free.”

Movement Traits and Movement Factors

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Warren Lamb‘s assessments of movement patterns draws upon principles established by the movement expert Rudolf Laban and the management consultant F.C. Lawrence. During the Second World War, these two men collaborated to enhance efficiency in British factories.

Their revolutionary approach utilized “trait and factor” theory in the following way. First, they identified the movement factors required for a given job. Next, they analyzed the movement traits of individual workers, based on observing each person’s movement patterns. Finally, Laban and Lawrence determined the degree to which an individual worker’s personal movement style matched the job requirements.

This procedure allowed Laban and Lawrence to sort workers into three categories. When the worker’s movement traits matched the motion factors of a job, he/she continued to do the job. When the worker’s movement patterns only partially matched what was needed to function efficiently, the worker was given movement training. When the worker’s traits did not match the job, the worker was given a different function more in harmony with his/her movement style.

For example, Laban observed one man whose assembly line task required a lot of rapid action that did not match the fellow’s movement preferences. In fact, he complained almost continuously, and this irritated his co-workers. Laban moved him to a slower paced job, one that required more precision and craftsman-like care. The man stopped complaining and his social relations with the other workers also improved.

MoveScape

Following the Second World War, Warren Lamb studied with Laban and collaborated with both Laban and Lawrence, becoming thoroughly grounded in the principles and procedures they had established. When Lamb began to work independently as a consultant, he followed the same procedures. He carefully analyzed the movement traits/movement patterns of the candidate, established the action factors of the job and based his advice on the extent to which the candidate was a good match.

Lamb gradually began to elaborate on the principles he had absorbed from his training with Laban and Lawrence. He recognized that, while everyone has to do his job, each person has more aptitude for some parts than for others. This led Lamb to approach his individual assessments according to the following convictions:

  • Each person has a distinctive movement pattern.
  • We should try to act in accordance with our movement preferences.
  • There is no one way of doing a job.
  • Maybe we can find a new way of doing a job that matches our movement patterns.
  • If it is impossible to find a way, then we are unsuited to that particular job.

Through disciplined study of authentic individual movement patterns and principled advice, Lamb came to be internationally renowned as a management consultant. Find out what one of Lamb’s clients had to say about the value of his Movement Pattern Analysis profile in the next blog.

 

Movement Patterns Are Individually Distinctive

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MoveScape Center, Denver

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.

The Significance of Posture-Gesture Mergers

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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.

The Merging of Posture and Gesture

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MoveScape Center, DenverIn 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.

Beyond Postures and Gestures

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Body language tends to focus on postures and gestures. Postures are still configurations of body parts. A military bearing involves a stiff uprightness. A bored adolescent will slouch. When sitting, the alpha male assumes the “power spread,” with legs apart and elbows out to the side. Thus postures are said to convey a person’s attitude.

MoveScape Center, Denver, COGestures are isolated actions of individual body parts. Some gestures are iconic, such as pointing the finger to indicate direction or shaking the head to indicate “no.” Other isolated gestures carry specific cultural meanings. For example, the explorer Captain Cooke is said to have been killed by the Hawaiians when he attempted to shake hands, for this gesture of friendship in England carried an entirely different meaning in Hawaii.

Scholarly study and popular body language books concur – postures and gestures have meaning. Unfortunately, this is where most analysis of physical behavior stops. Beyond the posture and the gesture there is nothing.

I find this quite curious, because idiomatic expressions in English indicate that postures and gestures can be misleading. “To posture” is to assume a false or affected attitude – to pose as something one is not. To “make a gesture” suggests that the action was done as a formality – not necessarily as a sincere expression.

If postures and gestures are the sum of what can be deciphered from the ephemeral stream of human movement, then much body language is misleading – a dumb show put on to fool the observer. This was the cynical conclusion of sociologist Erving Goffmann, as he brilliantly argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

I am not so cynical, however. I believe it is possible to see beyond pretense, to discern genuine expressions in human movement.

This was Warren Lamb‘s quest. It took him beyond posture and gesture. In the following blogs, I will discuss Lamb’s discoveries in more depth.

 

Warren Lamb, Creative Pioneer

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Warren Lamb is one of the most creative people I have ever known.  His creativity is likely to escape the casual observer, for Lamb is very much the proper Englishman and his long and successful career as a management consultant has led him to adopt a conventional façade.  Moreover, he is inclined to stand modestly in the shadow of his mentor, Rudolf Laban, who is widely recognized as a creative genius.

However, without Lamb’s contribution to the study of human movement, Laban’s own reputation would be diminished.  The ground-breaking work done by Laban and F.C. Lawrence in British factories in the 1940s would be nothing but a curious footnote in the history of industrial psychology.

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Fortunately, Lamb respected Laban’s ideas and took them seriously.  But he did not just slavishly accept Laban’s notions as givens – he tested them empirically by carefully observing movement behavior and modifying observation and analysis procedures as needed.  Challenged to think outside the box by the collaborative research he did with child psychiatrist Judith Kestenberg and physical therapist Irmgard Bartenieff, Lamb  imaginatively explored links between movement and personality, expanding and confirming connections intuitively outlined by Laban.  Moreover, each creative link had to hold up in the practical context of helping his business clients understand themselves and their fellow workers better.

As Lamb notes, “We all observe movement and form impressions of people from what we see…. But to progress beyond simple impressions there had first to be both a notation system and a language in which it could be discussed.  Laban started this by describing movement in terms of its various component parts… After his death it was for me to complete the process by building on the concepts he had given us and organizing his theories into a purposeful framework.”