From Meetings to Workshops: Escaping the Parallel Play Trap

When small children first start socializing, they don’t actually play together. They sit side by side, each absorbed in their own world of blocks or crayons, occasionally glancing at the other. Developmental psychologists call this parallel play: a healthy early step toward social interaction, but not yet real collaboration.

I’ve observed the same thing happening inside organizations for years. Teams proudly declare they’re “collaborating,” but what’s really happening looks more like parallel play.

Across companies and functions, the pattern is familiar: a project kicks off with a meeting focused on timelines and logistics. (Important, but I'd label that coordination, not collaboration.) Then, each discipline retreats to its corner. Product managers run customer calls, UXers research and sketch, engineers think through technical constraints. Everyone is working hard, but mostly in isolation. Drafts and artifacts are shared in Slack or Confluence, feedback trickles in asynchronously, and before long the team’s “collaboration” has become a collection of individual efforts, politely shared.

It may look efficient, but it rarely produces the depth of insight that comes from real, joint problem-solving.

More Meetings Won’t Fix It

When teams notice this pattern, the instinct is often to add more meetings. If we talk more, surely we’ll collaborate more, right? Yet, most meetings are built for updates or decisions, not for thinking together. A few voices dominate, others tune out, and the group leaves feeling like they're moving the work forward without actually moving the thinking forward.

Research supports this disconnect. Studies on cross-functional teams show that the quality of collaboration, not the quantity, predicts stronger outcomes. Teams that engage in structured, high-quality joint work outperform those that rely on unstructured communication or coordination alone.

So if more meetings aren’t the answer, what is?

Enter the Workshop

I, like many other design practitioners, love workshops for sparking collaboration. Before you roll your eyes, there’s a difference between a true workshop and what often gets mislabeled as one. When someone schedules a “workshop” that’s really just a freeform discussion, your resident UXer quietly dies inside.

A workshop is a purposefully designed session with structured activities that guide people toward a specific outcome. It blends individual thinking (so quieter voices get airtime) with group synthesis, giving everyone a meaningful way to contribute.

Here are three workshop activities to try in your own teams:

1. Surface what's hiding in plain sight with assumptions mapping

Begin with each person writing down assumptions about the problem, users, perceived constraints, etc. (One assumption per sticky note, physical or virtual.) Then, group and discuss them. You’ll quickly see where perspectives diverge and where they align. This levels the playing field and exposes gaps before they derail work later.

2. Weigh priorities together to "buy" a feature

After ideas are surfaced, give each attendee a small “budget” of votes to spend on the solutions they believe in most. This turns vague preferences into concrete trade-offs about value and feasibility, and a fast way to identify what different teams think is vital to solve.

3. Explore possibilities fast with some Crazy 8s sketches

Invite everyone, regardless of discipline, to sketch eight design ideas in eight minutes. It’s low-stakes, high-energy, and surprisingly generative. When people share their sketches, you often find unexpected overlaps and fresh directions that no single person could have reached alone.

These are just a few examples, and anyone can use them.

For a fantastic library of workshop activities and facilitation techniques, visit SessionLab (no affiliation, just a resource too good to gatekeep). You’ll find a filterable list of hundreds of techniques for different team challenges and goals, from decision-making to strategy alignment to creative ideation.

If you have a UXer handy to help plan, so much the better. And if you don’t, that’s okay too. Just give it a try. The simple act of designing how you work together will help get your team out of the parallel play track and on the path to true collaboration.