Cause and consequence / Urgent and important

In psychology cause and consequence refers to the concept of causality. An action or event will produce a certain response to the action in the form of another event. People tend to have first reaction as a doubt. Doubt is defined as a safeguard, as the demarcation of truth and untruth, as well as the delimitation of the credible and incredible.

English: A doctor examines a female patient. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The basic “misunderstanding” of the concept of cause and consequence - two different parts of the same coin - is revealed time and again when visiting a medicine doctor in basically any country of the Western hemisphere. Based on your complaints a physician determines what is “wrong” with you and then prescribes a medicine. Normally, they don’t bother themselves with the cause of your problem. Why? Is it ignored due to insufficient and incomplete knowledge or are there other reasons? In ancient China there was a different practice when dealing with illness and medical doctor earnings. People gave payments to a doctor not when ill but when they were healthy. When sick they were invited by a doctor to live with him and a doctor had to treat them free of charge. And how do our “Western” physicians earn their living?

Planning for the future sometimes causes anxiety. If, when planning, there is no proof of a connection between cause and consequence, a Western mind is driven to uncertainty. The initial reaction is to treat the problem – the consequence and, almost never, the cause. When financial markets exploded because of greedy banks, what was the first reaction? Don't crash a banking system! Just take from the state budget or, more precisely, take from the citizens, they should pay although they had nothing to do with it.

Within management this “cause and consequence subject” becomes obvious when dealing with urgent and/or important matters. Time pressure “ favours” the first – the urgent matters. But, is it a good practice? When dealing with urgent issues there is simply no time to think about important ones, too. However, the once important issues sooner or later become urgent. So, instead of visioning and dealing with important topics and having a time to solve them properly, we don’t have time enough at our disposal as the urgent matters keep piling up. And important matters (cause) are pushed into the future to become later urgent (consequence). 

Why do we perform so?