What on earth does a cat have to do with your next presentation?
Why do we care if the cat is alive or dead?
In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined an experiment as absurd as it was fascinating.
A cat is placed inside a sealed box with a mechanism that has a 50% chance of killing it. As long as the box remains closed, the cat is both alive and dead. In the quantum world, until we observe something, two opposite states can coexist. Reality is suspended, full of possibilities, waiting for a choice to make it collapse into one outcome.
What does this have to do with presentations?
More than you might think.
Every time you prepare a story (whether it’s a pitch, a keynote, or a brand video), you’re building a box. Inside, infinite potential meanings are waiting:
🎯 Your idea
💡 The vision you want to convey
❤️ The emotion you want to evoke
🧠 The action you want to inspire
Until you decide how to tell it, your story is all of these things at once… and none of them.
Alive and dead. Powerful and invisible. Memorable and forgettable.
And sometimes, it takes very little to change everything.
A small shift can change everything
Imagine two versions of the same presentation. In one, you begin with data points and bullet lists. In the other, you open with a lived story that gives meaning to those data points.
The content is the same, but in the first case, the audience listens; in the second, they connect.
A few weeks ago, I worked with a client facing this very challenge.
A powerful story, hidden behind too many slides, too much detail, too many numbers. The box was there, but inside, the story hadn’t yet chosen its form.
We shifted perspective: stripped away the unnecessary, brought people to the centre, and restored rhythm to the narrative. And something shifted. The message started to vibrate. It wasn’t just accurate anymore; it was alive.
It’s when you choose the tone, the pacing, the detail to reveal (and what to leave unsaid) that your narrative collapses into a lived experience. And the audience? They are the observer who changes everything. With their gaze, they complete the story and make it real.
Storytelling, like quantum physics, reminds us: there are no objective stories. Only possibilities waiting to be chosen. Your story exists fully only when you release it into the world.
So: what reality will you bring to life in your next presentation?
This article is part of Quantum Presentations: a series exploring how ideas from quantum physics can elevate storytelling, communication, and presentation design.
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