Knowldge of complexity and decision-making

A senior board member at an American airline and executive at a private equity firm that had recently bought this airline out of bankruptcy noted that the acquisition team did not expect three things after the buy-out:

1. The recent hike in fuel prices (buy was in 2004)
2. The difficulty in the negotiations with labor unions
3. The actions of competitors

I was left wondering whether they had actually planned the acquisition at all... This is not meant as denigrating their decision-making process or the individual who had the final say. It is rather the n-th anecdote on how businesses fail to use even basic system tools (nothing too complicated here, basic scenario planning and knowledge of history would suffice) in their decision making.

Of course hindsight is always 100% and not having to be part of the process does give one an advantage in criticizing from safety.

More importantly, despite these obvious, but apparently unforeseen, pitfalls the ailine is currently performing well. Given this, the point that came to my mind is what would have happened if they actually run the scenarios. If they considered scenarios with competitors messing their bread-butter markets, fuel costs tripling (from $30/bbl to $90/bbl) and the difficulty to "reason" with "militant" unions, what would the decision be?

Maybe "audentis fortuna juvet" or fortune favors the bold is a useful expression to have in mind even if the bold are audacious out of relative ignorance.

Herbert Simon's bounded rationality concept might fit well here as well as the later cognitive science literature might have exhausted this topic but hey there is always time to be continuously surprised...