The Co_Lab works at the intersection of strategic thinking and creativity to sustain meaningful contribution and enable clarity, direction, and impact to leaders in complex systems.
The Co_Lab supports leaders who drive vision and deepen meaning.
We offer leadership and strategy coaching to people shaping decisions and systems while also stewarding imagination, narrative, and cultural change. Their work sits at the intersection of business rigor and creative intelligence helping leaders think clearly, act decisively, and lead with coherence in complex environments. Whether guiding executives accountable for performance and operations, or creative and cultural leaders shaping purpose and identity, The Co_Lab supports clients to align strategy, culture, and execution.
They are especially skilled at working with leaders navigating ambiguity, transformation, and growth where clarity is needed not only in what to do, but in why it matters and how it is carried forward by people and systems.
CADRE (2018/403531/08) trading as The Co_Lab, is a registered educational institute, that seeks to facilitate critical consciousness through art based praxis. In essence, we focus on what we have dubbed as: "the facilitation of individual embedded Critical Consciousness skill sets, toward community and societal activation and change" (Nazier, 2020).
Founder, Dr Farieda Nazier, holds a PhD in Art & Design and two separate Higher Certificates in leadership (University of Johannesburg, South Africa).
Besides for her tranformative contributions as an artist, academic and activist, Farieda Nazier is a leadership and strategy coach working at the intersection of business, creativity, and education. She supports founders, executives, creatives, academics, and institutional leaders who carry responsibility for direction, decision making, and meaning helping them navigate complexity with clarity and confidence. Her work integrates strategic rigor with creative intelligence, aligning vision, culture, and execution across startups, corporates, educational institutions, and individual practices. Farieda is particularly skilled at helping people move from ambiguity to coherence, strengthening leadership capacity while ensuring that what is built is both sustainable and meaningful.
For Paolo Freire and Steve Bantu Biko, education can be our confinement
or our liberation. Our colonial history is evidence of the deployment of education toward political ends. The CADRE vision is premised on the notion of life long learning; and that the continued search for knowledge and consciousness is what will spark and fuel revolution.
We believe that Critical Consciousness is not a destination, but a temporal process and as Fidel Castro infers: “A revolution [within the self or society at large] is a struggle between the future and the past." As we uncover new insights and understandings, these too require interrogation to sustain its continued pertinence in the present.
To this end, CADRE facilitates the learning of consciousness-raising skills which puts each individual at the helm of their individual and relational praxis (theory and practice).
