Untapped Agility: 7 Leadership Skills To Overcome Resistance
Change and disruption in business are inevitable. While change is hard and disruption is threatening, Jesse Fewell shows us opportunity in Untapped Agility that exists in our organizations, readily accessible through seven practical leadership skills.
Fewell argues that organizations, teams, and individuals are willing to embrace change when given the opportunity in ways that elicit their creative energies.
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, creative energies will remain latent and untapped; worse, they will manifest as resistance and ambivalence.
- 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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Full Disclosure: I got my introduction to Agile from Jesse Fewell back in the early 2000’s. I have since followed him and returned for more agile training and coaching. The insights in Untapped Agility reflect the same practical, people-centered approach I’ve experienced firsthand from him.
What Untapped Agility Offers: A Framework for Agile Transformation
Jesse Fewell has spent years coaching organizations through agile adoption, and he’s noticed patterns and commonalities across organization types and transformation goals. Untapped Agility draws on his work across diverse organizations and contexts.
Agile transformation is change. Fewell reinforces this by referencing various change management models we’re familiar with. But he isn’t offering another model. Instead, Untapped Agility offers tactical advice to adapt textbook frameworks, case study examples, and our own plans to the individual realities of organizational change.
7 Leadership Skills That Create Momentum
The book dedicates a chapter to each of Fewell’s seven leadership moves designed to overcome agile 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 to Change
Fewell identifies a common pattern in agile adoption initiatives: we make some progress, and an obstacle inevitably arises. It’s what we do next that’s critical. He shows us how to make specific adjustments to help move the effort past obstacles.
Obstacles to change are predictable waypoints on the transformation journey.
He constructs each chapter to illustrate exactly what to do and why. He gives us the Boost (progress), the Barrier (obstacle), and the Rebound (adjustment). This framework normalizes setbacks as predictable and recasts them as opportunities rather than failures.
Relatable and Accessible
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 change management roles, as he personalizes their experiences and interactions.
While written for agile transformations (e.g., Scrum, DevOps, SAFe), Untapped Agility opens with an intriguing, somewhat humorous challenge encountered when opening a new Planet Hollywood location. That story amplifies the concept of organizational agility as the 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.
Why Untapped Agility Matters for Today’s Leaders
Fewell published Untapped Agility in 2020, capturing decades of experience coaching agile transformations. He couldn’t be more timely, given the growing drive toward organizational agility and the frustrations many organizations face pursuing it.
But these leadership skills are equally applicable to process improvement programs, restructuring and mergers, and remote/hybrid transitions. They are, in fact, highly relevant to any change initiative and are very compatible with familiar change management models, such as Kotter’s 8-step model and the Prosci ADKAR model.
Fewell’s 7 leadership moves supplements change management models by focusing on predictable barriers and tactical adjustments to regain traction and momentum.
He further connects these change leadership skills to lateral leadership principles from Getting It Done, recognizing that modern leadership succeeds through building alignment that respects individual interests, not by directing and commanding subordinates.
Key Leadership Strategies for Change Management
Context is Everything
We often start transitions following textbook case studies or prescribed solutions without properly accounting for our own context. While common advice, Fewell points out it 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. Collaboratively identify an incremental step aligned with the larger goals that addresses current needs.
Fewell’s Three Ps provides a structured approach to authentically adapt any initiative to your reality, not just at initiation, but continuously as conditions evolve.
I’ve seen transformation initiatives stumble when leaders assume what worked at Company A will work at Company B. Fewell’s Three Ps provide a structured way to adapt. In one initiative, we discovered the “pain” stakeholders experienced wasn’t inefficiency (what we assumed) but loss of autonomy (what they actually felt). That insight completely changed our approach.
You Can’t and Shouldn’t Try to Do It All
Change initiatives can pay off with significant dividends, but we possess only so much capacity, individually and collectively. Consequently, you must make deliberate choices about what to change and when. Otherwise, you risk 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 to Change Isn’t Refusal
I was particularly intrigued with the leadership move Own the Narrative, which addresses redirecting resistance to change. Fewell’s approach boils down to securing enough buy-in to achieve the next doable step. Which begins by 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.
Fewell’s approach echoes Fisher and Ury’s principled negotiation in Getting to Yes, focusing on underlying interests, not stated positions. When someone resists change, they’re signaling a genuine concern worth addressing, not an obstruction to overcome.
What Untapped Agility Doesn’t Cover
Untapped Agility is an essential resource for overcoming resistance to change initiatives. But these leadership skills reveal individual dynamics of personal agility and emotional intelligence that are supported by other resources beyond this book.
Additionally, these practices may work best in organizations with some baseline openness to change. Highly resistant or politically toxic environments may require more fundamental cultural work before these leadership moves can gain traction beyond the team level.
Also beyond the scope of this book is performance measurement. It is critical for any change initiative to have appropriate and timely performance metrics implementation, such as discussed in Hubbard’s How To Measure Anything.
Conclusion: Navigate Change Successfully
Jesse Fewell offers sound, practical approaches for getting through the messiness of any change. He writes in a relatable and accessible manner, despite tackling complex organizational dynamics. Untapped Agility reads easily and quickly.
This book is not prescriptive, not a step-by-step guide, and does not promote any particular change methodology. While practical, scalable, and widely applicable, practicing these leadership skills will require you to think honestly about your context, engage, and participate, and will cause you to grow.
Who Should Read Untapped Agility?
Anyone leading organizational change, not just agile transformations, should read Untapped Agility: the team lead implementing new practices, the manager translating executive vision into daily operations, and the executive wondering why a change initiative isn’t delivering results.
A central insight I take away is that most stalled agile transformations aren’t failures—they’re simply stuck at predictable barriers. Fewell’s seven leadership moves offer practical, tactical paths forward.
Bottom line: These Are Essential Change Leadership Skills
Jesse Fewell presents a thoughtful, experience-based guide that fills the gap between textbook methodology and the messy reality of organizational change. Untapped Agility is recommended for leaders at any level who’ve felt momentum in their change initiative stall and want concrete strategies for the rebound.
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Doing so supports this website and our ability to bring these book reviews and other content to you. We genuinely appreciate your support and take seriously our responsibility to providing quality, honest, and human-generated content to professionals like you.
About the Author: Jesse Fewell
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 coaching organizations through agile adoption, experience that informs every page of Untapped Agility.
Fewell has been enlisted by both legacy and emerging bodies, such as PMI, Scrum Alliance, and Agile Leadership Journey, to help develop and mature their bodies of knowledge. His contributions have shaped modern agile practices and agile leadership approaches.
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