ReThinking: Permission to play with Jacob Collier

What happens when a concert becomes a classroom for being human?

Imagine a roomful of strangers who suddenly start to sound like one body. The hairs on my arms lifted when a makeshift choir—led by Jacob Collier—turned an ordinary TED audience into a living instrument. It was messy, hilarious, and oddly tender. I left thinking about leadership, permission, and why adults are so hungry to play.

From a childhood seat to a global stage

Jacob traces this impulse back to his earliest memory: watching his mother conduct orchestras. That image stuck because it was less about notes and more about how she invited people into a shared feeling. He calls that feeling “wiggledom”—a goofy, useful word for the looseness and joy that music can restore. The phrase is playful, yes, but it also points to a serious idea: adults often trade vibrancy for straight lines, and music can be the shock that restores motion.

Permission beats qualification

Here’s what stood out: people don’t need training to sing together, they need permission. Collier designs simple, physical exercises—call-and-response patterns, animal-like vocal bursts, and big/small contrasts—that act as social cues. Those cues do something powerful: they redistribute attention outward. Instead of fixating on a solo performer, listeners become listeners to one another, and a room’s culture reveals itself in the way people respond.

Collective effervescence, live

He describes moments in Latvia and Estonia, arenas of song where tens of thousands remember shared songs as if they were inherited. That scale made me think of Durkheim’s idea of collective effervescence—only this felt less like ritual and more like reclamation. When strangers hum the same pitch, a social contract forms. People self-police gently; someone shouts and the room responds by integrating that shout into harmony. I found that both comical and deeply humane.

Harmony is not sameness

Collier insists harmony is relational, not uniform. He unpacks how dissonance and consonance function as emotional levers: tighten the tension, then let it resolve. That tension is more than a musical trick. It’s a method for embracing disagreement, experimenting with contrast, and creating more moving outcomes than endless bland agreement. I left thinking about how leaders could use a similar approach—allowing controlled friction to produce richer results.

Play as a leadership technique

He connects play to pedagogy. Education systems, he says, often “straighten the wiggly line,” privileging narrow metrics and making adults wary of improvisation. Collier’s antidote is simple: gentler cues, lower stakes, and a model of permission. When a leader lowers the bar for participation, new behaviors bloom. That’s practical. It’s also oddly political. Joy becomes a humble act of resistance—an assertion that vitality matters even when the world feels brittle.

Why viral choirs fascinate

There’s a contagiousness to these performances that shows up on social feeds. Watching a clip, you see yourself among the crowd, and that recognition triggers something reassuring. Collier says the clips hit a nerve because people are craving examples of collective action that aren’t performative competition but communal care. The viral part is less about spectacle and more about witnessing people choose to belong for a few minutes.

Arranging, not preaching

He also talked about arrangement as a strategic act. Reworking a familiar song—like his famous Flintstones arrangement—lets the audience bring their expectations and then delights them by shifting context. Quincy Jones once emailed him, half-scolding, half-cheering. That anecdote shows how subversion, deployed skillfully, builds trust rather than erodes it.

• Vocal bursts: primal sounds we make across cultures—useful building blocks for collective music.
• Faffing: a playful, low-pressure way to find new musical ideas by messing around.
• Audience as co-creator: Collier often adopts crowd ideas and folds them back into the performance.

What this means for everyday life

I kept returning to small experiments you could try tomorrow. A short musical cue can reset a tense room faster than an argument. Reframing practice as deliberate play, rather than rote repetition, makes creativity sustainable. And allowing a little dissonance—people not always agreeing—can create deeper harmony if it’s held and resolved with care.

Jacob’s music can feel defiant: an insistence that joy matters. That stubborn optimism is not naïve. It’s tactical. When a crowd starts to wiggle—when a choir forms out of people who don’t sing professionally—you witness a social technology in action. It’s messy. It’s occasionally off-key. It works anyway.

And so I walked away with a small conviction: leadership is less about issuing commands and more about permission architectures that invite people to show up as themselves. That idea is music-shaped—rhythmic, textured, and insistently human.

There’s a tenderness in watching strangers become a choir that refuses to let you leave thinking we’re separate. It’s a modest promise: life will be wiggly again, if you let it.