How do you define the steps to explore the data?
That is a very good framework of solving a question you have. According to me, it has multiple answers. I'll give you the one which I relate to.

After cleaning the data or rather while cleaning it, we have to be clear about the task ahead and about our results. 
The work on the data follows the below steps mostly:


Feature Detection
Training using the above features(there are many Machine Learning/Deep learning models to do this) like Classification (this depends on the task)
Check the trained model on validation test if needed and later on test set 
The features depend on the dataset. Standard deviation or to find central tendency isn’t always a criteria. Machine Learning is needed to train on the dataset in most of the cases.