Surtil – Home


“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.

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.

Beyond attention

“Beyond attention: performance pressure shifts information-processing complexity” Why does performance pressure sometimes cause choking but sometimes elicit exceptional performance? We propose that pressure shifts the complexity of information-processing rules that guide action. Performance improves when shifts move processing toward task-matched complexity and deteriorates when they promote maladaptive simplification, overcomplexification, or the use of rules that…

Beyond representations

“Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference” Active inference describes the system–environment boundary through statistical constructs such as the Markov blanket, a substrate-independent formalism that specifies a boundary’s functional role without committing to the physical structure realizing it. We ask what structure can perform that role, and propose Active Interference as a complementary, biophysically…

Beyond accuracy

“Beyond accuracy: interoceptive self-appraisal and the meaning of bodily signals” Highlights Large-scale psychophysical studies find interoceptive accuracy largely unrelated to affective and mental health. Interoceptive ability dissociates across cardiac, gastric, and respiratory channels, undercutting single-signal measures. Bodily signals become most informative during arousal and physiological challenge, not in the resting states where they are typically…