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.
Coffee Hunting
Alley in San Juan La Laguna, Lake Atitlán. Guatemala, November 2019.
Quality can sometimes be a scavenger hunt.
My name is Josué Morales and I’ve been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. Sometime during the harvest of 2012 I experienced the thrill of discovering a new coffee that was superior to most of the coffees I had tasted up to that point in my career.
There’s a special kind of anticipation about receiving a coffee sample. The texture, the smell, the way the coffee seeds look before being roasted. I like to grab handfuls of the un roasted coffee seeds and take a deep breath holding them right against my nose. There’s a story to be told in every single detail.
Sometimes the seeds look pale green, sometimes they look deep blue, and sometimes they have a gray color like that of concrete or the ash of a bonfire the morning after. The appearance is complemented by the smells.
Fresh and herbal scent often indicates that the coffee has been sun dried on a patio. If it smells faintly of wood, particularly that unmistakable smell of smoke from humid wood burning right before sunset in any rural home of Guatemala, it often indicates that the coffee was finished using a mechanical dryer.
There are also those coffees that smell like fresh bread out of the oven, and the ones that smell like dates and prunes that have been locked up in a box for a long time. These are coffees that have taken longer periods of time to rest with little to no friction to compromise the integrity of their structure.
I learned this by crouching down on the drying patio of every coffee farm I ever visited during harvest, and holding up to my nose those handfuls of coffee that were close to finish drying. I would do the same in the areas where they had mechanical dryers, and during the years I was operating the machine to mill my own bags of coffee I would do the same out of every bag I opened.
Between the years 2011 and 2016 I would be on the road for weeks at a time going from farm to farm all around Guatemala. I would arrive at different houses and different warehouses every day, and I would gather the coffee samples from all the people I was working with, or intended to work with.
It would take weeks for me to be able to taste the coffee. Up in the mountains there wasn’t even decent coffee, if any coffee at all to drink, let alone a way to get an idea on how those coffee samples would turn out once I finally had them roasted. So I trained myself to pay attention to all these little details that would be among the few things to have an immediate parameter on quality that I could talk about with the producers.
I would arrive back in Guatemala City with the car packed to the roof with hundreds of coffee samples that needed to be catalogued, analyzed and tasted. Each bag ranging anywhere from half a pound to a couple of pounds.
The majority of those samples were processed by individual producers, in their own individual way, with different machinery, a different care, and a different idea on how the process needed to be achieved.
Some of these coffees were dried on rooftops, some in the parking area of the houses where the producers lived, and some, where there is excess humidity, would even be dried in the living rooms on sacks of coffee placed on top of wooden boards that laid on the dirt floor.
The old guys that ran the patios, the few that remained from the time of “the grandfathers” that had started the farms, would “just know” when a coffee was ready to finish drying by chewing and biting into a coffee seed. Something I learned as well during those visits.
Standing in front of the sample roaster I’ve always thought about the moment of roasting a coffee as its final stage of becoming. It's the step, out of all steps taken in the making of that coffee, that will finish what started almost a year before when the coffee trees flowered in order to bear fruit.
As the moisture leaves the seeds when they’re starting to brown, the smells of fruit and spices blend in unison with the surface on the coffee starting to corrugate, mimicking the mountains and the valleys where it came from. The pockets of moisture show themselves as the coffee swells and builds the necessary heat momentum to caramelize its sugars and become roasted.
Batch after batch the sensations are different. The colors and the smells, the time, and the way the seeds react to heat will vary depending on the characteristics of the place the coffee comes from. Even coffees from the same farm, harvested on different days, will reveal different personalities and behaviors.
After doing this for long enough it’s almost possible to tell when a coffee has potential. They reveal themselves within the first minutes inside the roaster by invading the room with fragrant and loud aromas, and the unmistakable violence of their popping sounds once almost all moisture has left the seed, a point known as the first crack.
I have the bad habit of chewing a roasted coffee seed immediately after each sample has been roasted. The anticipation is just too high to wait a little longer. Coffee is finally ground and infused to be tasted or cupped, usually the day after roasting.
The experience then becomes a process of interpreting. A translation of sensory exploration that needs to find a way to fit into words that can describe the taste that is being perceived in the pallet.
Occasionally there will be a sample, out of the hundreds (and nowadays thousands) of little plastic bags that carries a message that is loud and clear. It will communicate details, not exactly about the impeccable attention to detail it received during its making, but about the sheer luck in the combination of factors that allowed it to become this exemplary expression of the trinity formed between soil, climate and plant.
These samples are rare, I’ve experienced maybe one or two per year during the last ten years of tasting coffee almost every single day. There are entire years where they just won’t happen at all.
I imagine these are the coffees some people, lacking a qualitative toolbox to describe them, use the quantitative scale and refer to them as ninety point coffees. I really wouldn’t know. What I do know is that, once I find them, I try to the best of my abilities to locate their source, to find where they come from, and, most importantly, to find the person who produced it.
During the harvest of 2012 I tasted the coffee from Vinaros for the very first time. A coffee from the rainforest region of Cobán. It was something new and refreshing and in a flavor spectrum unlike anything else on my portfolio. The coffee sample had made its way to my hands, somehow.
During the months that followed I kept asking everyone I knew about that farm, trying to find a connection. I later learned that Vinaros was a name used less often than the main farm it belonged to, a farm called Finca Santa Isabel owned by a guy that was really hard to find.
One day, as I stood in the reception area of the Lab in Guatemala City, this tough looking fellow opened the door.
He was pointing a finger at me as he stared and asked “are you Josué?”
“Yes I am, who are you?” I answered.
“What do you want?”
I was like, “what do you mean, what do I want?”
“People tell me you’ve been asking about me, so what do you want?”
I was still very puzzled. “Who the hell are you? And what do you want?”
“My name is Luis Valdes, from Finca Santa Isabel. You wanted to find me, so here I am, what do you want?”
To be continued…