Cause before resolution 

When something goes wrong we have a tendency to want to fix it as fast as possible. The human mind sees a problem as painful and any hint of resolution steals focus from finding the cause.

By all means if a simple fix is ok because it’s not that important then have at it. 

For example, if somebody blocked my car while unloading, if I know of a store nearby that I like, I can browse the store and wait to see if the car is gone when I’m done.
But sometimes we end up circling the problem using trial and error to eliminate it instead of finding the cause and surgically repairing it.

For example, if someone is grumpy, you can try to console them. You may quickly find yourself grumpy too, if you’re fortunate you’ll realize this before you make things worse. 

After that you may ask someone else to console them. That may not go well after which you throw up your arms and chalk it up to the person being a jerk.

If you had looked for the cause first, you might’ve found out the angry person is exhausted because they haven’t had more than two hours sleep for three nights in a row.

At this point, sleep is probably the only thing that will help. No amount of consoling  will help but sleep is an easy fix.

When you’re solving problems, separate finding cause from finding a resolution.

It’s productive to jump to resolution if you  decide that finding cause is not worthwhile. But if you’re not aware that you jumped to resolution you probably will end up frustrated and wasting a bunch of time. Perhaps making things worse.