We will be running one of our problem-solving sessions for SME owners and managers at a conference organised by the Chartered Management Institute on the 7th October.

The event is on the 7th October in Cullompton, Devon. It has been designed to be an interactive conference that will make you think as you explore your individual strengths, life balance, communication, networking, working smarter and personal productivity in the 21st Century.

We are delighted to have been appointed as a supplier on Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council's dynamic purchasing system. We have been approved as a supplier of training services for staff development and heath & safety.
We look forward to a successful working relationship with Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council.

We are proud to announce that we have recently become a business support provider on the West of England Growth Hub, helping our local business community to grow sustainably.
The resource works by creating a two way referral and collaboration process between the West of England Growth Hub and the existing local business support infrastructure. Finding the help that you need in a quick and easy manner has always been a challenge for businesses, the West of England Growth Hub gives us the opportunity to offer our support and expertise.
This fresh approach by the West of England Growth Hub will be a unique offering nationally and we are excited to be involved in this prospect. The West of England Growth Hub will facilitate access to the most appropriate local providers, via a tailored, intuitive website journey. This is all based upon extensive research and wide consultation with local businesses. The West of England Growth Hub’s unique approach ensures that everything they do reflects the voice of businesses; and the community is at the heart of all it does.
The West of England Growth Hub is powered by Business West for The West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).

The Chartered Management Institute has just released a report that gives insight into how managers cope with adversity. 
The findings of the report, and the recommendations that it makes, are in line with what we experience.
Understanding and managing risk (through tools such as Bowtie risk assessment) and building a culture where failures are seen as an opportunity to learn (through effective investigation) are at the core of what we do. 

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is the only chartered professional body for management and leadership, dedicated to improving managers’ skills and growing the number of qualified managers. 

Follow the CMI on Twitter at @cmi_managers: if you're based in the South West of England you can follow the regional branch at @CMISouthWest.

John Baker, our Managing Partner, has just done a short video introduction on our favourite subject - understanding and managing human error. The purpose of the video was to raise awareness why it's important to understand why errors occur. It's aimed at small-medium businesses in non-safety critical industries. John's talk is part of an innovative project by our friends at Bitpod, a specialist online video business based in Exeter.  
​The concept of their 'In a nutshell' programme was to invite members of the business community into their in-house studio to film a two minute advice-sharing video, giving them experience of video production. Funded by Bitpod, the only cost to the contributors is their time. Once filmed, the videos are uploaded onto a dedicated YouTube channel from which they are accessible by the contributors and shared jointly across a number of social media platforms.
You can see some of the things that lead humans into making mistakes in our gallery. We provide a wide range of consultancy and training services to help understand and manage human error. 

More than one in five managers who fell short of performance expectations in the last year still received bonus pay-outs, according to new data published today [10 May] by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and XpertHR.

Data from the 2016 National Management Salary Survey reveal that many managers and professional staff still reap the benefits of bonus pay outs despite falling short of expectations. Of those deemed to be underperforming or developing, 23% still received a bonus payment on top of their basic salary. The average bonus payments to this group were worth £4,270, or 12% of their basic pay, taking their total packages to £40,067. 
The data also suggest that so-called ‘rewards for failure’ could be even more common for more senior leaders. Among senior managers who fell short of performance expectations, as many as 43% took home bonuses.

Management-speak annoys us intensely here at Silver Moor. Far from making things clearer, it confuses and irritates employees. Management consultants are often blamed (usually with justification) for introducing these phrases. As a management consultancy practice (we ‘operate in the management consultancy space’) our clients are often very pleased (and surprised) by our plain speaking. This is because we see the effects of poor communication in high-risk industries when we investigate serious incidents and accidents.
The video on the right, produced by education charity Teach First, gives a great insight into how confusing management-speak can be. They asked primary age students to identify and translate some of the worst phrases used by management in workplaces.
The Plain English Campaign has a lot of free resources to help. We use these principles both in our work (for example writing operational procedures) and in our training – to help you improve your own skills.
Try our three ‘management speak’ games to see how you and your managers fare. 
Keep your communication short, keep it clear, keep it free from management-speak and jargon.

Tuesday, 26 April 2016 will mark 30 years since the Chernobyl accident in the former USSR. 
​The accident had a major impact on the workers and local
residents. The accident caused the deaths (within a few days or weeks) of 31 power plant employees and firefighters, brought about the evacuation of about 116,000 people from areas surrounding the reactor during 1986, and the relocation of about 220,000 people. Vast areas of land were contaminated.  
About 240,000 workers (known as “liquidators”) were called upon in 1986 and 1987 to take part in cleanup operations at the reactor and within the 30 km zone surrounding it. Activities continued until 1990, and about 600,000 people received the special status of “liquidator”.
The Chernobyl Forum predicts the eventual death toll could reach 4,000 among those exposed to the highest levels of radiation (200,000 emergency workers, 116,000 evacuees and 270,000 residents of the most contaminated areas).
The accident remains the most severe in the history of the nuclear power industry, causing a huge release of radionuclides over large areas of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation. After the evacuation of the population within a 30 km zone (a bit bigger than greater London) in April and early May 1986, the area closest to the reactor site (over 4000 km², roughly a quarter of the size of Wales) was excluded from cultivation. 
The longer-term impact of the radiation, has proved hard to quantify. In 1991, a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering stated there could eventually be around 10,000 fatalities. However, some sources put the death toll well into six figures.
Food restrictions (sheep farming) were still in place in England and Wales up to November 2012, when they were finally lifted.

The accident occurred during a low-power engineering test of the Unit 4 reactor. Safety systems had been switched off, and improper, unstable operation of the reactor allowed an uncontrollable power surge to occur, resulting in successive steam explosions that severely damaged the reactor building and completely destroyed the reactor.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report into the accident highlighted several human causal factors, including:

• Operating procedures that were not based on the findings of the safety analysis of how the plant should be operated
• Inadequate and ineffective communication both between operators and between operators and designers
• Inadequate understanding by operators of the safety aspects of their plant, the requirements of operational and test procedures
• A general lack of safety culture, at the national level as well as locally. 

The accident report (updated in 1992) can be found on the IAEA website.
The Guardian has an interesting article on the town of Pripyat (a town 3 km from the reactor), 30 years after the accident.
The immediate aftermath of the accident was filmed by Vladimir Shevchenko, who died from his exposure to radiation. A copy of the film can be seen on YouTube.

We're delighted to announce that our Managing Partner, John Baker, has been made a Fellow of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs (FIOEE).

The Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs is for anyone who is thinking about starting or already running their own business, those who support them and those employed in innovative and entrepreneurial businesses. The Institute's purpose is to support its members in developing and continuously improving their enterprising skills allowing them to maximise both their personal potential and their wider contribution to the growth and success of UK PLC. The Institute has more than 30,000 members from across the spectrum of enterprise activity – students who have yet to start a business, entrepreneurs in the early stages of running their business, business owners looking to grow their business, managers working in an enterprising way, mentors and support professionals, and recognised learning providers.
You can find out more on the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs website.