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. 

What does Human Centered coffee production mean to me?

The weakest link in the supply chain is also the strongest one.

The Valley of Nebaj in Quiché, Guatemala. October 2006.

When I was growing up, my father thought that I had to get to know every single municipality in my country, Guatemala. At first glance, this seems like a feasible idea, even an exciting idea. But in the 90’s Guatemala was still a very remote country, severely underdeveloped, most of it with precarious or even non-existent infrastructure, and living through the last wave of the Civil War.

This was not just about the geography and the numerous paradisiacal landscapes. This was also about the people. About 76% of the population is divided into 22 ethnic groups of Mayan descent, each with its own language, its own customs and traditions, and, as I would learn years later, with their own particular ways of going about business.

My favorite place was –and is still to this day– Panajachel, a small town located on the shore of Lake Atitlán. Or “The Lake”, as tourists call it. About 18km long and 8km wide (11.2 x 5 miles), a maximum depth of 340 meters (1,120 ft) makes it the deepest lake in Central America. It’s framed by three stunning volcanoes, all higher than 3,000 meters (10,000 ft), and surrounded by lush forests in every direction. It’s not only my opinion that this lake is beautiful. Alexander von Humboldt literally called it “the most beautiful lake in the world.”

Panajachel is an absolutely magical place. It’s decorated with some of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen, and also with the most diverse of populations, as uniquely colorful as the sunsets themselves. This is the place that congregated most of my extended family.

Visiting my grandparents was a whole different story. They lived in the eastern part of Guatemala, which is as hot and arid as a land can be without being properly a desert. Just as the environment is different, life is also different. In this cracked and dusty soil, the vegetation is very peculiar, often more brown than green and full of huge thorns. There are always vultures flying high against the sun in circles.

These two were the most recurrent places. From here we would make camp and move on to other more remote areas that could only be described as part of a fairy tale book. I spent all my childhood and adolescence going on these expeditions.

My father and I at the market of Chichicastenango in Quiché. Guatemala, 1989.

When I reached adulthood, I was very familiar with even the most remote places in my country. I knew how to find and drive through the most incredible secret roads. I knew how to maneuver through the many extreme microclimates that change drastically from one kilometer to the next one.

But living all these experiences meant much more than just appreciating the astonishing scenery Guatemala has to offer. It meant experiencing how people live in each part of the country. It meant hanging out with locals in each town and sitting in the square just watching time go by. It meant having dinner and chatting long hours at the tables of friends and going to mass with them on Sundays. It meant experiencing and learning how differently the very same activities were carried out between one place and another.

It involved talking to people. A lot. Asking for directions. From how to get to a place, to where to catch the sunrise or the sunset. Listening to stories and legends. Paying the most careful attention to the advice given by the elders.

I discovered that this small country was a very big world.

One of the last places I visited was the northern part of Quiché. Perhaps the most severely hit by the terrors of the Civil War, where the worst of the massacres had occurred. The type of unspeakable contradictions that make these lands cry tears of blood.

I had read about these places in history books and in reports from the United Nations. The names always seemed to me like places that had been ravaged by war and were deserted to the point of being wastelands.

To my surprise, places like Cunen, Salquil, Acul and the whole region known as The Ixil Triangle, formed by the towns of Nebaj, Chajul and Cotzal, are among some of the most exuberant and breathtaking places I’d ever been to.

The drive to Quiché is a rollercoaster. Up and down the most complicated road in the country, with its sharp turns barely hanging from cliffs, with potholes in every section of the way, and, now and then, tons of pouring rain. At some point you reach Sacapulas, which is so low in altitude that it feels as if you’re in a beach town in the middle of the mountains. From here it’s all uphill into the clouds.

I would drive this road on a Friday afternoon. Feeling how the weight of the “things of the City” gradually stayed behind until they disappeared completely. Ten to twelve hours later, depending on the weather, I’d be sleeping in Nebaj.

On Saturday, the noise of a very busy street outside my window would wake me up. After sunrise, under the faint but constant rain, I would walk two blocks down towards the square to have breakfast, down the steps in a corner into a diner called Comedor Elsim.

One of the strongest impressions I have of Nebaj was coming out of this comedor, thinking already about the drive back to the city, when I saw a large group of people gathered in the middle of the street. There was a man holding a stick in one hand and a rattle toy on the other. In front of him, on the ground, was a brown piece of cloth. The crowd was absolutely silent as he danced around it in circles holding the stick and rattling the toy. Underneath the cloth was a snake. As the serpent enchanter whistled there was thunder in the distance. Downhill, a tent was being set up. The circus had arrived in town. The year was 2005.

I felt a strong affinity towards the Ixil people I had made friends with. The leader of this one group, called Joel, had told me how he survived two massacres while he was still only a kid. He was always looking for ways to do business and bring projects to his community. A sense of community that can only be understood in light of the terrors of their past.

Once a month I would drive up to Quiché with my father, who is still to this day my guide and companion when going to these difficult places in Guatemala. We would have meetings with a group of people who were trying to get organized to form a Cooperative so that they could be beneficiaries of some government program.

This was my first attempt at working with a community, and my intention was to document how many members they had, where their parcels were located, how many coffee trees they had in these parcels, and how much coffee was produced.

This was also the first time that I was trying to adapt my Coffee Traceability System to follow collective decisions instead of the individual decisions of single producers.

As I interviewed them, with a translator interpreting my questions, my father would snap their portraits, one by one, and we would make them name tags as a symbol that they were part of the project, although the pictures were mainly visual aids for me so that I could remember their names.

Portraits of Members from the Ixil Community in Nebaj. November 2005.

The idea was simple: if my system was working on larger farms to trace the samples back to their handling, back to their harvesting, and even back to the growing of the coffee trees, then it would also work for a group of producers if I treated the Cooperative as a single large farm and I just added one additional line to register who the individual producer was.

With my system in place, I would have all the information necessary to advise each producer individually on how to improve their practices so that their samples would result in a better taste of the cup. With time, they would end up delivering beans of such a quality that I could roast them to an extraordinarily above average cup quality, just like I was doing with the larger farms.

(Read: What does Specialty Coffee mean to me?)

I’ve always preferred working with people with whom I have a strong friendship. The relationship was there. I’ve always preferred working with people that are eager to learn and to excel. This hunger was there. We had spent months planning and getting ready to solve any issues that might arise along the way. The preparation was there. My Coffee Traceability system had been adapted to their Cooperativa. Everything was there!

Harvest came and not a single coffee sample was sent to me.

By the time I went back to the mountains, all of the harvest had been sold to someone else.

Sitting with them at Comedor Elsim, I was trying to have them explain to me what had happened. We had spent nearly a year working together so that in the end I would receive their samples and I could taste their coffee. And in the most critical moment of the whole process, nothing happened.

What went wrong?

All along the way, I had been paying attention to how to make things work. But I had overlooked how people work.

These people had learned for generations to act from fear before anything else. So when a swiss guy came to the community waving the Fair Trade flag and offering to pay sub-par prices up front, they sold. They sold everything. They sold everything to less than half the price that I was offering to pay because they were not comparing prices. They could only put certainty on the scale. And with only certainty on their minds, a very low price up front was undoubtedly better than the promise of a higher price that I had offered to pay at the end of harvest.

Up to this day, I still consider my project in Quiché to be my biggest failure. But it’s also the failure from which I learned the most important lesson of my professional career: things will only work if you truly put yourself in the shoes of the people that you’re working with. Not just a bit. All the way! Until the point where you deeply understand their feelings and emotions and take care of that first.

After you have taken care of their feelings and emotions, then you can take care of their interests. Then you can talk business. Then you can start doing business, and actually succeed.

It’s only after you have taken care of their feelings and emotions that each and every one of those individuals become the strongest link in your supply chain.