Sea Ranger Service trains young people to become Sea Rangers: a year in paid employment, working on research, nature restoration and monitoring of protected areas at sea and along the coast. Their goals are ambitious: restoring 1 million hectares of marine nature by 2040, and training 20,000 young people for a maritime career. Their teams are small, young and constantly in motion. Each year, a new group of Sea Rangers starts a seven-month programme in which they have to form as a group. Often strangers to each other, they have to learn to work together within a week during an intensive bootcamp.
Sanne Boekhoff is Head of People there. She's an organizational psychologist, and when she first came into contact with Working Genius, in a training run by Annabelle, she held back a little at first, watching cautiously from the sidelines.
"I'm always a bit critical at first, that's my background. What's the reliability, is it validated, what is it actually based on? But I became very positive very quickly, because I like that you don't just look at, like with DISC, this is how this person communicates and this is how that one does... you look at a whole process, and you look at the process of work and how you divide that well. And it's less about: this is who you are as a person. It's more about what gives you energy," says Sanne.
That was the start of how Working Genius, three years later, now runs through nearly every HR process in the organization.
The challenge
Sea Rangers have seven months. In that time, often with eight people they don't know, they have to form a team in a small environment and get straight to work. That's daunting for everyone. Some of them have never been outside their own village before.
Among the more operational teams, Sanne also saw resistance. The English terminology of the model didn't land naturally.
"I noticed that people in the more operational teams felt boxed in faster, or thought: what are these difficult words? What is discernment?" says Sanne.
Her explanation: people aren't always used to talking about themselves this way, they're young and don't have much work experience yet, and the language in the report is sometimes fairly academic for people who don't like reading. That's exactly why she now wants to build a Sea Ranger-specific version, more on that below.
How it grew
Not a one-off workshop, but an adoption that deepened over several years. The first year centered on sessions with the steering group, the leadership level, with a parallel pilot among the Sea Rangers themselves in the Netherlands. The second year brought the rollout to the Sea Rangers teams in the United Kingdom, where Sanne came along as co-facilitator. After that, she decided she wanted to be able to run the sessions herself and completed the facilitator course. Now she runs the trainings herself, every year, for every operational team, and has woven it into recruitment, onboarding, quarterly meetings and the project management system. For the steering group — which she's part of herself — she prefers to bring in Annabelle. "I can't both facilitate and participate, that doesn't work well."
What it has brought them
A shared language. The first thing that stuck after the very first sessions: people kept using the words to name why something was frustrating. That language is now everywhere, in the monthly strategic meeting, in the quarterly sessions, and spontaneously between colleagues.
"You hear a lot of: oh, we need to discern this for a moment, we need to think this through properly. So it's really in the language now, I notice," says Sanne.
A working team, faster. In an environment where teams have to function within days, speed isn't a luxury.
"I think it speeds up the process of forming that team and really understanding each other. You want the team to get through the storming phase as quickly as possible, and this just speeds that up," Sanne explains.
Ownership over how work is divided. This is perhaps the core of it: the model gives people a way to say something isn't working without it becoming a complaint, and to do something about it together.
"If we really see that someone is working too much in their frustrations, we've sometimes sat down together with the team and looked at: okay, what are other people's geniuses and frustrations, and can we redistribute tasks?" Sanne explains.
Embedded in systems, not in one-off training moments. It's now literally built into how a project starts.
"We also have a new project management system. When we start a new project, you first write a project brief where you think everything through: what needs to happen, which people I need. And there's also a section where someone has to think about: which geniuses are on my team, and what does that mean for the work that needs to get done," Sanne explains.
Teams asking for it themselves. The clearest proof that something sticks is that people come back and ask for it themselves.
"This year we happen to have teams that came back, who also worked with us last year. And they consciously asked for their training again. It had faded a bit and they could pick it back up. They'd found it useful," Sanne explains.
For Sea Ranger Service, People is one of its three official core values, alongside Safety and Purpose. Working Genius connects to that, and not by accident. "I do think this helps to have the conversation, in a safe way, about where things are a bit friction-y with a colleague, for example," says Sanne.
Looking ahead
Sanne wants to take the next step: her own Sea Ranger version of the model, in language that fits who they are.
"I want to adapt it, really using our own (maybe different) terms. That means it's just going to live even more. And you also have to keep it alive: it's not like you're done after one training, you have to keep doing it," says Sanne.
Curious whether Working Genius could take root in your team this way too? I'll ask a few questions, you'll ask a few, and we'll know soon enough together whether it leads anywhere.
Source: interview with Sanne Boekhoff, Head of People at Sea Ranger Service (July 2026); nl.searangers.org/missie (accessed July 2026); Patrick Lencioni, The 6 Types of Working Genius (The Table Group, 2022).
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