
“If the map doesn’t agree with the ground the map is wrong”
Gordon Livingston – Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart
Surtil has as mission to help individuals, teams, companies and organizations to make clever and innovative decisions,
making good use of a set of methodologies, tools and decision intelligence.

Surmounting
The Information Lens.
“we’ve moved from the age of enlightenment to the age of entanglement where sense-making aided by imagination is now more critical than ever.“
John Seely Brown
Information uses & needs,
e.g. across supply chains and ecosystems:
Transparency, Product Passport,
Sustainability, Fair Trade
Circular Economy
Stakeholder Economy
The Information Lens
Cultural and Economic Traditions,
Operational Excellence, KPI’s
Contractual Specifications and Quality Control,
Flow of Goods/Money — Flow of Data/Value
Trust and Fear
Methods and Tools
Variety of Creative techniques,
Innovation Games, Design Thinking Tools,
Story Telling , Brain Writing
Stakeholders Representation and Involvement
Safe Information Sharing
It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said:
the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever,
but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand,
“Who are we?”
Erwin Schrödinger – Science and Humanism, Physics In Our Time
About Walter Stiers:
- Information Architect
(Systems, IT, Applications, Solutions, Enterprise, Ecosystems) - Scientific Foundation
(Geosciences, Ecosystems, CAS, Sense-making, Neuropsychology, … ) - Arts – Music
- Design Thinking Facilitator
- Decision Science



Walter [at] Surtil.com
My blog covers articles, publications, reflections and stories on the evolving landscape of decision science, decision intelligence, AI, Informational Lens, and more.
Linking fast and slow
“Linking fast and slow: The case for generative models” A pervasive challenge in neuroscience is testing whether neuronal connectivity changes over time due to specific causes, such as stimuli, events, or clinical interventions. Recent hardware innovations and falling data storage costs enable longer, more naturalistic neuronal recordings. The implicit opportunity for understanding the self-organised brain…
Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization
“Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization” html, pdf, video, Nature Communications Despite their groundbreaking performance, state-of-the-art autonomous agents can misbehave when training and environmental conditions become inconsistent, with minor mismatches leading to undesirable behaviors or even catastrophic failures. Robustness towards these training/environment ambiguities is a core requirement for intelligent agents and its fulfillment is a…
Exploration and Exploitation & Coping Strategy
“Transition Dynamics Between Exploration and Exploitation Predicts Individual Differences in Coping Strategy” Adaptive decision-making requires balancing exploitation of known rewarding options with exploration of uncertain alternatives, a dilemma also known as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. While this framework has been widely studied in reinforcement learning research, its relevance to coping, defined as the cognitive and behavioral…
