The facts were staring us in the face

87–90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.

Take a moment with that. You've been staring at the same map your whole life. The data was always there — you just never asked it where the people were.

That gap — between data everyone has and the question almost nobody asks of it — is where the most valuable business findings live. I want to show you exactly how one of those gaps opens up, because the shape of the discovery is the whole point.

It started with a coat

Last winter, somewhere around the tenth time I zipped up my coat to step outside into a Nova Scotia January, a question surfaced: why was I never this cold growing up in Johannesburg?

Johannesburg sits deep in the interior of a continent, far from any ocean. Everything I'd absorbed about weather said interiors run cold — no sea to moderate the temperature. Nova Scotia is wrapped in ocean on three sides, and it was freezing. Johannesburg is landlocked, and it never snows. That was backwards, and it nagged at me.

So I looked up my latitude in Nova Scotia. About 44 degrees north.

Which meant nothing. A number on its own never means anything.

Then I looked up Johannesburg. About 26 degrees south.

Still nothing — until I asked the question that actually had teeth: which North American city sits at Johannesburg's latitude?

The answer was Miami.

I grew up in Miami and never knew it

That one stopped me. Climatically, the city I grew up in is Miami. Of course it never snows in Johannesburg — it sits at the same distance from the equator as South Beach. Of course Nova Scotia is brutal — it sits at the same latitude as the north of Spain, except without the Mediterranean to keep it honest.

That same month I'd watched an NFL playoff game — the Jaguars in Jacksonville, crowd in short sleeves under a bright sun, while every other game that weekend was played in a blizzard. I hadn't thought twice about it. Now it clicked into the same picture.

Then I pushed the question one step further. Which European city sits at Johannesburg's latitude?

There isn't one.

There is no Europe that far south. Johannesburg — which on the map looks like it's hanging near the bottom of the world — is closer to the equator than the entire continent of Europe. Closer than London. Closer than Paris. Closer than Madrid. The place that looks extreme is climatically mild and central. The places that feel like the default — the cities that appear at the centre of every map — are the ones living far out toward the cold edge.

The map had been lying by omission

My mental model of the planet was quietly symmetrical: a Northern Hemisphere and a Southern Hemisphere, roughly balanced. It isn't, and the questions kept exposing how much it isn't.

How much of the world's land is in the north? About two-thirds. Take out Antarctica and the genuinely uninhabitable stretches and it skews further still. The far southern half that felt like an equal counterweight is mostly ocean.

Which led to the last question, the one the whole walk in the cold had been circling. If most of the land is up north, where are the people?

I had a number in my head. I figured 65%. Pushed to bet, I'd have gone as high as 70.

The real number sits between 87% and 90%. Close to nine in ten human beings alive are north of the equator. I had looked at that map for thirty-odd years and never once seen it — because I'd never asked it where the people were.

One thread, pulled on a cold morning in Nova Scotia, unravelled a mental model I didn't know I had.

The same move, inside a company

That kind of discovery — a shared, boring, fully-available dataset interrogated from one angle nobody bothered with — is the exact move that produces the most valuable findings inside a business. Same data. One question nobody asked. An answer that reorganises what you thought was true.

Here's the clearest example I have.

I spent years as a quantitative analyst at a major South African retail bank. Every month we contacted roughly 1.5–2 million people — mail, email, SMS, outbound calls. Mail was by far the most expensive channel.

We measured success by response rate: of the people we contacted, what fraction said yes?

Mail posted the highest rates every month. Every report confirmed it as our best channel. The numbers were real. The conclusion was completely wrong.

Here's the trap. Because mail was expensive, we reserved it for our best, most responsive customers — people likely to say yes regardless of what we did. So of course they responded at high rates. We were paying a premium to take credit for behaviour we weren't causing.

The question hiding in the data we already had

The modelling team held back a random 10% of every campaign list as a control group — standard practice, used for model calibration. Nobody had thought to turn it into a different question:

How many more people responded because we contacted them, versus the ones we left alone?

That's the difference between correlation and causation. The holdout was a built-in randomised controlled trial, sitting unused in our own data for years.

Measured against it, the picture inverted entirely. The expensive mass-mail campaigns generated almost no lift over the control group. The genuine, causal lift was concentrated in outbound calls — and in mail only to the top 15–20% of customers.

Over eight months we cut the marketing budget by nearly 60% while net lift held flat.

Same value. 40% of the cost. No new tools, no bigger team — the same data everyone already had, asked one question nobody had thought to ask.

What this looks like in a small business

The mechanism is identical, at smaller scale. A business tracks which marketing activities produce the most visible results — the channel that feels busiest, the campaign that generated the most enquiries. Those numbers are real. The conclusions they point to are often wrong, for exactly the same reason: the most visible results cluster around the customers most likely to convert anyway.

The question worth asking is always the counterfactual: would this have happened without us? That's not a data-science exercise. It's a habit of thought — and you can build a rough version of it without a modelling team.

The population number was always in the map. The question is what's sitting in plain sight in your business that nobody's thought to ask about yet.

My calendar is open if you'd like to find out. The first conversation is free, and it's 15 minutes.