I want to start with a confession that might surprise anyone who works with numbers for a living: For most of my career, I trusted data I had no business trusting.
Every org chart, marketing plan, recruitment campaign, and engagement survey I’d ever seen leaned on the same data about people: age, income, gender, job title, etc. We sort people into these cohorts, these buckets, and then we make decisions about them, spend money on them, and build whole strategies around them. I never stopped to ask whether the buckets themselves were accurate—it’s just how we did things. I’m sure you’re familiar with this process too.
Somewhere along the way, however, I realized we might be wrong. So my company decided to check.
We’ve now run approximately one million surveys across 180 countries and in 152 languages to generate a statistically accurate model of the global population. One of the things you can do with a comprehensive dataset like this is ask (and answer) a simple but pivotal question: How similar are people inside a demographic group, really? Take everyone in a generation, or everyone earning over $250,000, or everyone with two kids. How alike are they… on the inside?
The answer, on average, is 10.5%. Flip that around, and round it off; this means the people in any demographic bucket are about 90% dissimilar. And yet we keep running around talking about boomers versus Gen Z, men versus women, and the wealthy versus everyone else, as though these labels were truly insightful.
Here’s an even more startling realization. If you ignore demographics entirely and treat all eight billion of us on earth as one undifferentiated mass of upright, breathing humans, the similarity among us is 8%. So all the demographic targeting in the world—all the time and money and clever segmentation—is only 2.5% more accurate than doing nothing at all. For this reason, I sometimes joke that demographics are essentially business astrology. We might as well decide our target audience is a bunch of Capricorns and spend accordingly.
Demographic data may tell you what a person is, but it tells you very little about who a person is. Once you start defining people based on demographics, you start applying generally accepted stereotypes—your brain does this automatically. That’s where a lot of the trouble in a workplace comes from, and a lot of the trouble in the world. Because Gen Z are not all the same by virtue of the generation in which they were born. Rich people are not all the same because they share the same income bracket. Men are not all the same by virtue of their gender, and neither are women.
To understand who a person actually is, we need to understand what matters most to them—in short, their values. Not the four words a company paints on the wall behind the reception desk, but the real deep-seated human values that drive who people are, what they do, and how they show up in the world.
Our data makes these values measurable. And when we sort people by their shared values instead of their demographic labels, we find the similarity inside the group jumps from 10.5% to 89%. This is meaningful stuff!
For years now, we’ve been told that empathy and soft skills are the future of leadership, and many of us have nodded along while wondering how best to act on this advice. As someone who’s more comfortable with spreadsheets than soft skills, that’s exactly why I find the ability to measure values so freeing. After all, leading with empathy simply means understanding what matters most to the person in front of you. We now have a tangible way to do this.
So the next time you catch yourself reaching for a generational label to explain your team, or a demographic profile to explain your clients, stop and ask a better question. Not “What are these people?” but “Who are these people, and what matters most to them?” You won’t always have the answer, but asking the right questions will get you further than demographic labels ever did.
I’ll be digging into these concepts at the Infinite Conference in November. Come find me afterward. I love this stuff, and I’m always up for an argument about Capricorns.
More from the author
David Allison will be presenting two sessions on day two of the 2026 CPABC Infinite Conference (November 27). In the breakout session “What Clients Value Most,” he’ll explain how to build client relationships by focusing on a values-based approach. Participants will work through scenarios from their own practices and apply values data to client relationships at every stage of development. In the closing keynote session, “Human Behaviour on a Spreadsheet,” David will present a structured, evidence-based way to understand what matters most to the humans on your team. More details at pd.bccpa.ca/infinite.
David Allison is a human values expert, an international speaker, and the best-selling author of We Are All the Same Age Now: Valuegraphics, The End of Demographic Stereotypes and The Death of Demographics: Valuegraphic Marketing for a Values-Driven World. He is the founder of the Valuegraphics Project, which compiled the first global inventory of core human values, and the CEO of the Valuegraphics Research Company. Hear him speak about shared values.
This article was originally published in the September/October 2026 issue of CPABC in Focus.
