Back to top

Why I joined the IFVP Board of Directors

My name is Frank Wesseler and I recently joined the IFVP Board of Directors. I live in Cologne, Gemany, together with my wife, daughter (11 months) and Vince the dog.
 
In order to answer the question why I joined, I will give you a little background about myself. After high school, I started working for Xerox (mostly printers and copiers at the time). So in a way, I was already dealing with putting marks on paper - it was just different back then. Thinking of it, I already learnt a lot about the effect of color and the use of whitespace. Visual Facilitation was still far away at that time, we were talking more about the paperless office, which was a vision back then.
Only when I started working in the realm of process improvement did I learn about the power of visuals on the shop floor. Visual Management is one of the core pillars of Lean Management and I started to embrace the use of visuals more and more. To support the statistical evidence of an improved process to management, we always used visuals, which were a lot easier to understand than a p-value (never mind the stats language here).When I started to conduct business improvement trainings, I came across bikablo and pretty quickly started using the technique in my daily business.
In 2016 I joined bikablo as a freelance trainer and this is when I had my first encounter with IFVP. My highly valued colleague Stefan Böker and I flew to Washington DC to participate at the conference and run two breakout sessions. It is difficult to describe the feeling both of us had, because we didn‘t know what we had to expect. Stefan was running his first breakout sessions in english and I was very new to the field. The welcoming atmosphere and the friendly people we met blew us away. I certainly made friends for life and I never knew back then that I would see almost everyone the year after when Carola (now my wife) and I did the bikablo US tour and also attended the conference in Decatur.
 
Coming back to the question - why did I join the board. The major reason really is that one of my colleagues asked me if she could recommend me. I didn‘t think of myself as being eligible, hence it didn‘t cross my mind to put my name forward. I decided to say yes to the recommendation, because I do have a lot of experience when it comes to processes and thought it could be beneficial to the organisation. I enjoy working in international environments and as the IFVP definitely is one, it is a good fit. Personally I also wanted to understand how IFVP works in the background, who the people are that make it happen, etc. It has been a great journey so far and there are many exciting things in the making. I also experience that an 11 months old daughter requires a lot of attention, which limits my availability for the board. I am very much looking forward to all the many things to come and especially the conference - where I will meet a lot of good „old“ friends and am excited to make new ones.