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This morning’s Washington Post includes an article about the airline flight with the worst on-time performance in the United States during the month of September. This particular flight, from New York to Washington, DC, was late 100 percent of the time.

It’s difficult to be consistent in any area 100 percent of the time. Now, of course, the lateness of a particular flight is affected by dozens of factors outside of the control of the flight crew—weather, crowding on runways, delays on other flights. And certainly any product or service you provide for your members will be affected by just as many outside influences.

But perhaps (to add to the ongoing conversation about celebrating failure), if something is consistently going wrong at your association, there’s a way to take some element of that consistency and turn it into a strength.

For example: Say you are having difficulty publishing books due to member reviewers’ extensive and repeated changes to manuscripts. While timeliness is a problem, clearly you have volunteers with passion for the subject matter and a willingness to contribute a great deal of their time to ensure that a publication is the best it can be. To capitalize on that passion while setting aside the issue of timeliness, you could consider transforming the books into wikis—making the material available in a timely manner while also allowing your member reviewers to put in as much time as they think is necessary to polish and update the information.

Consistency is an element of greatness—as long as you harness it correctly.