My friend Warren Lamb, who has died aged 90, was a pioneer in the field of movement studies, building on the ideas and practices of Rudolf Laban, arguably the creator of German modern dance.
Warren, the son of Rose (nee Wilkinson) and David Lamb, was born in Wallasey, (then in Cheshire, now in Merseyside). He first heard about Laban in his early 20s. He had served during the second world war in the Royal Navy protecting the North Atlantic convoys and his demob money paid for his first year at the Art of Movement Studio that Laban, by then settled in Britain, had founded in Manchester. Warren joined in November 1946 (a move his father never understood or approved of).
He helped Laban with his groundbreaking work in factories, where workers were matched with tasks according to how they moved. Until this time, work studies had focused on time and motion in an attempt to increase productivity. Laban used to defend his observations through force of personality – he was a man of considerable charisma. Warren, still young and inexperienced, had to convince managers of the validity of his conclusions through a careful explanation of his observations. By having to do this Warren developed his own simpler approach to movement analysis. He became an independent consultant from 1952, and later set up his own consultancy company, Warren Lamb Associates.
Warren's biggest intellectual leap was to assert a correlation between a person's movement profile and their decision-making process. His ideas, theories and practices were honed through 60 years of working with management teams. He lectured prolifically at universities and conferences internationally. Although he wrote books – most notably Posture and Gesture (1965) – he wrote only in the early morning, before dropping off his four children at school. Three more books followed, most recently, A Framework for Understanding Movement (2012). He was never happy with his books and was constantly researching for new evidence to support his ideas.
Warren is survived by his second wife, Barbara; by his children, James, Elizabeth, Imogen and Timothy, from his first marriage, to Joan (nee Carrington), which ended in divorce; and by eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.