Friends and colleagues would assume I was sulking – fretful about the budget, the traffic or the possibility that David Beckham would end up trotting around a football pitch for one last medley of complaints to the referee, misplaced passes and light tapping of the ankles of agile opponents as they raced by our national icon.
The free data revolution started by Gordon Brown's government, and the Coalition's opening up of government procurement to smaller companies as well as its implementation of "agile" implementations through the Government Digital Service (GDS) has changed the face of government radically since January 2010.
Carbon War Room is bold and agile, RMI has the rigour," said Branson, who said he would continue to support the new operation financially.
I predict that 2014 will be the year of the agile worker – this means giving staff access to data and information on the move, helping them spend more time with patients and less time travelling or in the office.
As well as suffering increased risk of chest infections, strokes and heart attacks due to cold homes, elderly people become less agile, and more likely to fall and break a bone.
Agile people often think it's not necessary -- after all, they say, the analysis is best performed by the developers working closely with the customer as they go along.
The Agile way is to embrace change, and more than that it's to structure your working practices around enabling and encouraging it.
Graham Greene, infamously, reviewing Wee Willie Winkie in the London weekly Night and Day, wrote: "Infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult … her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry … watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity.
What impressed me most was how skilled and organised the "hooligans" were – they were a quick-moving, agile force, constantly changing while remaining a solid phalanx.
Sacha Romanovitch, responsible for people and culture on Grant Thornton's national leadership board, suggested that organisations should, through their recruitment, create an agile board environment that is attractive and enables people to make their best contribution.
A 1937 book called The Night Climbers of Cambridge was full of photographs of agile young men (exclusively) climbing up drainpipes, over fences and balancing atop the spires of the old colleges.
