Work items run from a task, not a state. Although a process can only be in one state at a time, each leg of a parallel split can concurrently run a task (same or different) and those tasks can each route work items. If you need to get info from the work item back to the state itself so you can make decisions inside the leg of a parallel split, you could create a work item out variable, and assign it to a task out variable, which then gets assigned to a process variable.