A Recipe for Data Intuition — Analytics as Craft

Anna Filippova draws a parallel between the professionalization of cooking and the current state of analytics: both started as hand-me-down craft knowledge locked inside organizations, and both need democratized “recipes” to mature.

The cooking analogy

Intuition — “a form of knowledge that appears in consciousness without obvious deliberation.” Data professionals develop this through years of pattern recognition, but unlike cooking, there are no YouTube channels or influencer blogs sharing analytics “recipes.”

The analytics profession is stuck in the era of the French Monarchy:

• Inside organizations: grandma’s cookbook — hand-scribbled recipes passed down through analyst generations
• Outside organizations: either “Plain Cookery” (toy datasets, made-up problems) or intensive apprenticeship in adjacent fields (Finance) to break into “High Class Cookery” (Data Science)

The gap

Without access to others’ recipes and a formalized theory of “cooking up analytics insights,” aspiring data professionals stand in front of fridges full of big data, learning to cook by throwing ingredients together until something sparks.

The opportunity

Where are the data influencers? Can the gap be filled the way cooking was democratized — through accessible, practical, experience-based content that teaches the craft, not just the tools?

Connects to analytics craft, analytics is a profession, content strategy.

Open questions

• What would an “analytics recipe” actually look like as a content format?
• Is the analytics scorecard concept a version of this?