Surtil – Home


If the map doesn’t agree with the ground the map is wrong

Gordon LivingstonToo 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.

MORE About Surtil

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.

Active Construction of Past Episodes

“The active construction of past episodes” Episodic memories – declarative memories of past events, characterized by rich spatiotemporal context – play a central role in guiding perception and behaviour. Here, we advance a model that integrates episodic memories within the active inference framework. We describe how episodic memories are incorporated into the generative models used…

MOPGA: Multidisciplinary science

“Multidisciplinary science funding is more than ever a planetary priority: Reflections from the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program” Global change poses “wicked problems” that have become ever more complex, pervasive, and damaging. Developing innovative solutions increasingly require diverse research approaches. The Franco-German Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program was designed to create a unique…

Wise Machines

“Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition” Although artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this opinion article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We introduce human wisdom as strategies for solving intractable problems—those outside…