  Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life,
from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal
conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group
discussions are commonly seen as a way of reaching better decisions compared to
solutions that do not require coordination between the individuals (e.g.
voting)---through discussion, the sum becomes greater than the parts. However,
this assumption is not irrefutable: anecdotal evidence of wasteful discussions
abounds, and in our own experiments we find that over 30% of discussions are
unproductive.
  We propose a framework for analyzing conversational dynamics in order to
determine whether a given task-oriented discussion is worth having or not. We
exploit conversational patterns reflecting the flow of ideas and the balance
between the participants, as well as their linguistic choices. We apply this
framework to conversations naturally occurring in an online collaborative world
exploration game developed and deployed to support this research. Using this
setting, we show that linguistic cues and conversational patterns extracted
from the first 20 seconds of a team discussion are predictive of whether it
will be a wasteful or a productive one.
