  Understanding team viability -- a team's capacity for sustained and future
success -- is essential for building effective teams. In this study, we
aggregate features drawn from the organizational behavior literature to train a
viability classification model over a dataset of 669 10-minute text
conversations of online teams. We train classifiers to identify teams at the
top decile (most viable teams), 50th percentile (above a median split), and
bottom decile (least viable teams), then characterize the attributes of teams
at each of these viability levels. We find that a lasso regression model
achieves an accuracy of .74--.92 AUC ROC under different thresholds of
classifying viability scores. From these models, we identify the use of
exclusive language such as `but' and `except', and the use of second person
pronouns, as the most predictive features for detecting the most viable teams,
suggesting that active engagement with others' ideas is a crucial signal of a
viable team. Only a small fraction of the 10-minute discussion, as little as 70
seconds, is required for predicting the viability of team interaction. This
work suggests opportunities for teams to assess, track, and visualize their own
viability in real time as they collaborate.
