Untapped Agility: 7 Leadership Moves To Transform Your Team
Change and disruption in business are inevitable. While change is hard and disruption is threatening, Jesse Fewell shows us opportunity in Untapped Agility—opportunity that exists in our organizations and our people, readily accessible through seven leadership moves.
Fewell’s core argument is organizations, teams, and individuals are actually willing to embrace change when given the opportunity in a way that elicits their creative energies and desire to achieve more. The problem is that energy and desire is rarely elicited—it’s usually solicited. That’s an important nuance to grasp which Fewell illustrates effectively in his first leadership move, “Stop Selling, Start Aligning.” Without grasping that nuance, transformative energies will remain latent and untapped; worse, they will manifest as resistance and ambivalence.
I am not trying to be clever with words, I am trying to express the difference between soliciting and eliciting is the difference between compliance and ownership, between dragging people along and unleashing their energies that will drive your transformation in a way that actually works.
Book: Untapped Agility: Seven Leadership Moves to Take Your Transformation to the Next Level
Author: Jesse Fewell
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2020)
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What “Untapped Agility” Offers
Jesse Fewell has spent years coaching organizations through agile transformations, and he’s noticed patterns and commonalities across organization types and transformation goals. This is where Untapped Agility comes from, personally working with many organizations and individuals.
Transformation is change, and Fewell reinforces this by referencing various modern change management models we’re familiar with. But he doesn’t offer another model. Instead, Untapped Agility offers tactical advice to adapt textbook frameworks, case study examples, and our own plans to the individual realities we all face.
7 Leadership Moves
The book dedicates a chapter to each of seven leadership moves designed to overcome transformation challenges as they inevitably arise:
– Stop Selling, Start Aligning
– Give It Away
– Throw The Textbook Away
– Master “No”
– Attack Culture And Structure Together
– Look In The Mirror
– Own The Narrative
Getting Past Obstacles
Fewell identifies a common pattern that occurs in essentially any transformation initiative: we achieve some progress and an obstacle inevitably arises. It’s what we do next that’s critical. He encourages us to make an adjustment to help everyone move past the obstacle—not just them, not just you, and not just the initiative but everyone and the initiative together.
Barriers aren’t failures, they’re predictable waypoints on the transformation journey.
That’s what these seven leadership moves are designed to do, help us make an appropriate adjustment to get past obstacles that will inevitably arise—to take your transformation to the next level.
He frames this pattern as the Boost (progress made), the Barrier (an obstacle), and the Rebound (the adjustment) and uses it to help illustrate each leadership move. Importantly, this framework normalizes setbacks—barriers aren’t failures, they’re predictable waypoints on the transformation journey.
Relatable Illustrations and Personas
He further grounds the book by creating three personas—a team lead, a manager, and an executive—illustrating their experiences in each chapter’s scenarios. You will not only be able to relate directly to one of the personas, but also gain an appreciation for leaders in other roles, as he personalizes their experiences and interactions.
While written primarily in the context of agile transformation (e.g. Scrum, DevOps, SAFe), Untapped Agility opens with an intriguing and somewhat humorous architectural challenge faced when opening a new Planet Hollywood location. That story amplifies the concept of agility as an outcome-oriented capacity to adapt to changing conditions and respond to feedback—Fewell illustrates how a challenge with the power to sink an initiative also has the power to create surprising positive outcomes.
See our book review on “Getting It Done: How To Lead When You’re Not In Charge.” Fewell references this book by Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp in Untapped Agility. In it Fisher and Sharp explore the concept of lateral leadership and other practices that have since come to underpin much of what we see in agile organizations today. Their concepts and advice are timeless and their book is organized in a manner that can serve as a ready resource to keep close at hand.
Some Key Takeaways
Context is Everything
We often start transitions following textbook case studies or prescribed solutions without sufficiently (or properly) accounting for our own context. While advice to tailor an initiative to your own situation may not be new, Fewell points out this common advice often comes with little actionable guidance. He offers these Three Ps to fill that gap:
- Pain. What are people actually experiencing? Recognize it, acknowledge it, respect it.
- Purpose. What higher-order outcome is the proposed transformation seeking to achieve?
- Pivot. Work collaboratively to find an incremental step aligned to larger goals that addresses present needs, constraints, and limitations.
Fewell’s Three Ps provide a structured approach to authentically adapt any initiative to your reality—not just at initiation, but continuously as conditions evolve.
You Can’t and Shouldn’t Try to Do It All
Transformation can pay off with significant dividends, but we possess only so much capacity, individually and collectively. Consequently, we must make deliberate choices about what to transform and when. The consequence of avoiding these choices is overcommitting and overtaxing yourself, your team, and your organization—ultimately derailing the progress you’re aiming for.
It’s a counterintuitive truth: you’ll get there faster if you slow down.
Resistance Isn’t Refusal
I was particularly intrigued with the leadership move “Own the Narrative,” which addresses redirecting resistance. Fewell’s approach boils down to securing enough buy-in to achieve the next doable step—and that begins with reframing our understanding of resistance not as refusal but as genuine, if poorly-packaged, pragmatism.
People are thoughtful. They may lack information or maybe they see something you don’t. When someone resists, you have an opportunity to learn and to leverage that learning to improve the effort. Try applying the Three Ps.
Conclusion
Jesse Fewell offers sound and practical approaches for getting through the messiness of transformations. He writes in a relatable and accessible manner—despite tackling complex organizational dynamics. Untapped Agility reads easily and quickly. Fewell writes to everyone.
This book is not prescriptive, not a step-by-step guide, and does not promote any particular methodology. While practical, scaleable, and widely applicable, practicing these leadership moves will require you to think about your context honestly, it will require you to engage and to participate, and it will cause you to grow.
Who is this book for?
This book speaks to anyone leading change, not just agile transformations: the team lead implementing new practices, the manager translating executive vision into daily operations, and the executive wondering why an initiative isn’t delivering results.
Fewell’s central insight is most stalled transformations aren’t failures—they’re simply stuck at predictable barriers. The seven leadership moves offer practical, tactical paths forward.
Bottom line
Jesse Fewell presents a thoughtful, experience-based guide that fills the gap between textbook methodology and messy organizational reality. Untapped Agility is recommended for leaders at any level who’ve felt transformation momentum stall and want concrete strategies for the rebound.
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About the Author
Jesse Fewell was an early student of the agile movement and quickly became a key contributor to its development and maturation. He’s a recognized leader in the agile community with extensive experience teaching, coaching, and mentoring organizations and people—myself included.
Fewell has been enlisted by both legacy and emerging community bodies—PMI, Scrum Alliance, Agile Leadership Journey—to help develop and mature their bodies of knowledge. Through his work and dedication he has made significant contributions to what agile and agility is today.
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