Unpacking and the Coffee Beans Procedure
Or: How to avoid wasting huge amounts of time and money and ending up with a vehicle that doesn't actually work.
Crazy Beans
This article about “unpacking” covers the approach to really thinking about a problem:
Face it: you're a crazy person - OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter by Adam Mastroianni.
I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”
If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:
- Which kind of coffee mug is best?
- How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
- Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
- What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
- What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?
The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.
The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.) Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint.
Applied to vehicles / overlanding
This was one of the questions that opened my mind when I met Jez and the House Of Flying Spanners - people always talk about wanting to buy this accessory or do that modification and a lot of the time it's not clear exactly why they want it, other than it's something they've seen someone else has and they perceive it as an upgrade of some sort.
But if you stop and ask them to explain why they want it, or how it actually makes things better, they can't always explain it.
Jez went a step further with vehicle builds - question #1, over and above all else was: What do you need the vehicle to do?
That means seriously sitting down and actually thinking about specific things you need or want to achieve, not just a shopping list of accessories. Where will you be driving it, how much range does it need, what sort of abuse does it need to stand up to, how deep do you need it to be able to wade, how fast does it need to be able to go on rough ground, how much does it need to carry, etc. etc…
So many people will start with “Well I need a 3” lift and I need a roof rack and I need a bullbar“ because that's what they've seen on other vehicles and never stopped to ask if any of that stuff is actually helping in a useful way.
Camels are awful
Perhaps the best example of this is the Camel Trophy Defenders - absolute icons of off-roading, the vehicle many people still think of when they think of a Land Rover or 4×4 or indeed when they think about overlanding…
With apologies to Humphrey as this was the first photo of a camel I found in my collection…
They very obviously have a ton of equipment - snorkel, roll cage, roof rack, winch, bull-bar, spotlights, and a load of other gear that is all there for a reason and all undoubtedly does a job.
But here's the thing - they are not very good.
They are good at doing what they were designed to do, but that is not what most people actually want even in an overlander.
Rant in progress - come back soon.
