Nicole Bastien

Founder & Principal Partner at What Matters | Founder & President at CO-LAB Austria | Founder & Director at COLAB South Africa

Nicole has spent more than 25 years moving through systems most people choose between. Social worker. Lobbyist for the Bavarian Employer’s Association for the Metalworking and Electrical Industries, and the Bavarian Industry Association. Managing Director. Executive and non-executive leader across profit, non-profit, and NGO contexts. She has navigated power from the inside of boardrooms, communities, and spaces between. Nicole learned early that what is spoken aloud is never the whole story. The real forces move underneath.

That instinct has its roots. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic and watched a political and economic system collapse in real time. Too young to fully understand what had led to that moment, but old enough to feel the tectonic undercurrents. That experience gave her something particular: a firsthand understanding of what happens when a paradigm ends. Of how systems, people, and economies behave from the inside, the subtle signs, when the ground shifts beneath them. It is knowledge that cannot be taught. It informs everything she does.

She believes the roots of the economy are human. That capital is not only money but also social, intellectual, environmental, and relational. That economic development has to be, first and foremost, a matter of dignity. Of taking every human being seriously, with respect and genuine curiosity, regardless of where they live or what the current system has decided they are worth. That belief is not a philosophy she arrived at. It is something she has lived, tested, and built her life's work around.

The CO-LAB for Future Economics is the structural expression of her belief. Nicole founded it to hold the long game by creating the intellectual and operational foundation for economic systems change, sustaining field work at the intersection of capital and community, and building the conditions for what the economy is quietly becoming. It is the place where rigorous thinking, lived experience, and the willingness to work at the edge come together.

Alongside the CO-LAB, she stewards What Matters, a global initiative for regenerative community economies, and runs her Fine Advisory, working with investors, entrepreneurs, and leaders who sense that something needs to shift in their work, their capital, or the systems they are part of.

She holds a degree in Social Affairs and Social Work and an MBA in Change Management and Consultancy. For nearly three decades, she has trained and practiced in Systemic Constellation Work, Organizational Development, Living Systems, and regenerative economics and finance. She mentors at Spinlab Accelerator, coaches at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, and contributes to SHEconomy and other publications. In 2022, she synthesized a life lived in transitions in her TEDx Talk on The Beauty of Transition.

The world doesn't change when we fix the surface. Everything Nicole builds is oriented toward what's underneath.