
“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.
Dennett’s Real Patterns
“Dennett’s Real Patterns in Science and Nature” How the concept of a pattern, as understood in information science and applied in contemporary AI, can address deep questions in science and philosophy. The explosive growth of AI and machine learning in recent decades is predicated on the recognition and exploitation of patterns in data. Of course,…
Persisting Human–AI Gap in Visual Creativity
“Stable Diffusion Models Reveal a Persisting Human–AI Gap in Visual Creativity” While recent research suggests Large Language Models match human creative performance in divergent thinking tasks, visual creativity remains underexplored. This study compared image generation in human participants (Visual Artists and Non-Artists) and using an image-generation AI model (two prompting conditions with varying human input:…
Social Observations, Decisions, Explore/Exploit
“Observational learning of exploration-exploitation strategies in bandit tasks” In decision-making scenarios, individuals often face the challenge of balancing between exploring new options and exploiting known ones—a dynamic known as the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In such situations, people frequently have the opportunity to observe others’ actions. Yet little is known about when, how, and from whom individuals…
