When success leads to failure

How real people can become the greatest challenge to Human Centered Design 

Palencia, Guatemala. January 20, 2013.

The rain found them sleeping, rolled up in their ponchos like mummies. At first they thought they were dreaming. They were longing so much for rain that they dreamed about it. But they were awake, with their eyes open in the dark, listening to the reins of heaven, and with the might of the thunder they couldn’t sleep again. The day grew slow to come, for them to see their lands wet. The dogs came into the ranches. The water also came into the ranches, like a dog through its house. The women pushed closer to the men, even in their sleep they were scared of the tempest and the lightning. 

Gratitude must smell, if it has any smell, like wet soil. They had their chest full of gratitude and every few minutes they would say: “May God pay God.” The men grow sleazy when they have sowed and it doesn’t rain, women suffer their bad temper, and that’s why those abundant waters sounded like joy for the women who were half asleep. The color of their breasts, the same color as the wet dirt. The black nipples. The moistness of a nipple full of milk. The wet soil was like that breast that provides nurture. Yes, the earth is like a big breast and all the pawns hungry for the harvest are attached to it, desiring milk that really tastes like the milk of a woman, that tastes like the young sugar cane when bitten into. If it rains it's easy to see, there’s philosophy. If it doesn’t, there’s only drama. A blessing of planting. How evenly they sprouted with the first rains. Something never seen before. Each one was going to harvest sixty bushels. More or less, seventy. Maybe more. Never less. And the beans, how were they not to grow so well? If beans were native here, and the seeds they brought were famous! And pumpkins, they would have to spear. They might even sow a second time. How useless of them if they didn’t take advantage of the moment. It was proven that God didn’t take it as an offense when they tricked the old man. Cheating the rich is the law of the poor. The proof was these amazing rains. Not even if they had designed them. Oh, man. When they start grilling the corn. That’s what they would say, believing that time would be slow, they could feel how they were already grilling it over a slow fire because it's no good if it goes too fast.

– “Men of Maize.” Miguel Angel Asturias. 

My name is Josué Morales and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. The cycle to finally execute a strategy that would enable me to tackle the market behavior took me fifteen years to close. 

My experience of working with communities in Guatemala up to the year 2010 was so disappointing that for years I avoided working with communities and cooperatives. As my views of economics strengthened also did the knowledge that business is not done between organizations, or between countries, but between people. I avoided the possibility of engaging in business where decisions were not taken by one or two individuals. 

But as we say in my country, necessity has the face of a hungry dog. Perverse situations continued to spread in the country, between insecurity, extortions, migration, leaf rust, lack of access to capital for coffee in the banking sector, the collapse of the global market prices, and the generational changes. Many of the larger farms I worked with, or was prospecting to work with, started losing the will or the possibility to continue. 

Coffee, being a cash crop, made its base out of the small producer in order to continue supplying the market. Whether I wanted to or not, I also had to start looking in the direction of the small producer. 

I had to search well among my feelings about the failure in Quiché in order to set it aside and to be able to design a new way of engaging with small producers. This was the key word. I had to design a way to make this possible. 

Read the whole story about Quiché: What does Human Centered coffee production mean to me?

The eternal problem of any farmer is money. It's never enough. Even when it's enough, it will not be enough as the uncertainty of being in agriculture in a very vulnerable country can only allow to measure results one harvest at a time. Some you lose, some you don’t lose as bad, some there’s a little left to keep the faith on what we do. 

Guatemala is a country where there’s no access to credit, there’s no venture capital, and no investors that will invest without a colonial mentality. The model for financing that existed in the coffee industry during the second half of the twentieth century consisted in recurring to receive loans from exporting houses on the promise of delivering the future harvest.

This model failed as well, and not only did it get the exporters broke, but the producers and half of the country’s production was lost more because of this than because of any natural catastrophe. 

The design of a new supply chain couldn’t be based exclusively on money. Even if it was available, the current models that were in place up until 2010 weren’t working. In order to move the industry forward and create a movement focused on quality something needed to happen that was completely outrageous and out of the box. 

Cooperativa del Tomastepec in Palencia was the first Cooperative I chose to work with after many years of avoiding collective enterprises. 

Tomastepec is integrated by perhaps some of the most stubborn people I have ever met. They had one advantage: they had built a centralized processing station. It was the dirtiest, most poorly planned, and most dysfunctional processing station, but they had one.

Josué Morales (center), explaining how to dry coffee at the Cooperativa Tomastepec. January 30, 2014.

This cooperative was a couple of hours away from Guatemala City so it made sense for me to work with them. I could drive up there every weekend, or as often as needed. I was finally able to have a place where we could separate the production from many different producers from one area to understand what each one of them contributed individually. 

This processing station meant that I would have the opportunity to taste coffee with the producers themselves, but most important, I was in sufficient proximity that problems could be identified immediately and changes made just as fast. 

The process of identifying problems, ideating, testing, and executing was done on a weekly basis. This is what made all the difference in creating the opportunities for success. We were no longer waiting a year to test, we were waiting days. 

I needed to produce coffee around the idea of having an identity, even if that meant it was a collective identity. Designing the process to achieve this needed to be centered for and around the variables that affect the people who produce the coffee. But it wasn’t only about the quality and keeping things separate. All design is inherently human centered because it's about how a person interacts with a product, a service, a system, and with each other. 

So having the coffee come at the right time, to the right place, to be processed with the utmost quality without exactly having the infrastructure to make it happen required much more than just picking coffee at its ripest. 

We, and I say we because all the members of the Cooperative and I spent countless hours meeting every Saturday at their warehouse in Palencia debating the ideas I was proposing; we came up with a schedule of deliveries so that we would get to process at least two lots for every producer during the harvest. 

We came up with a calendar system of appointments that was designed based on distance, the vehicle coffee was being brought in with, and how the cycle of ripening was dispersed among the farms of the group. Everyone knew when they were supposed to deliver so they could bring in their most uniform picking and coffee from their healthiest trees. 

Josué Morales, middle row third from the left, and the board members of the Cooperativa del Tomastepec. Palencia, August 29, 2015.

More than depending on knowledge about coffee processing and production, quality, in this case, depended on timely logistics. 

It took hard conversations and hard work to commit, to show up, and the consistent determination to fight with all my conviction for ideas that defied head-on the “this is how we’ve always done it before.” 

In the end, my colossal efforts rendered the results that we all needed: the coffee from the entire harvest was sold. 

This also meant two things, two opposite things. 

First, my program had created a set of conditions that had never existed before, in which coffee could be perfected, tested, and brought to market at a rhythm that allowed for the coffee to be sold by the time harvest ended, at a price that made all the efforts possible. Most importantly, solving the main problem which was liquidity. 

Human Centered continuous improvement had been designed and tested, and it had worked. 

Second, that my program led to an unprecedented successful harvest. This was interpreted by my friends at Tomastepec as having found “the recipe” to produce coffee. They interpreted the success of my methodology as a consequence of their coffee being inherently superior in quality, and not because we had spent two years designing a procedure for that quality to happen. 

They were convinced that any additional design processes wouldn’t be necessary now that their coffee was finally being discovered. Stubborn as they were, no further improvement proposals would be tried or even considered from then on. 

They convinced themselves that their coffee was worth a price that the market wasn’t willing to tolerate. Making it impossible for me to continue growing the market, especially if I couldn’t continue to innovate. 

The President of the Cooperativa del Tomastepec during those years was don Higinio Gómez. He knew better. He finished his term and then left Tomastepec to follow me in the pursuit of more fertile soil to implement the design for quality and trade that we had created. This time it would be bigger, faster, and better.