The way the world works is going through a paradigm shift. It’s a shift from a world based on top-down/command and control to bottom-up horizontal structures and the implications for everything we do, and in particular politics, are profound. These truly are new times.

Walk around Westminster and it must be akin to Berlin before the fall of the wall. Everyone rushes around, doing the same thing, expecting a different outcome. They are talking down, while everyone else is having a conversation. They are living in old times.

Just like that wall, the 20th-century party political model will eventually collapse because morally and culturally nothing supports it. It can’t answer the biggest questions: how to stop the poor getting poorer and the planet burning?

But the compelling evidence of change isn’t found inside the Westminster beltway but beyond it. Outside these whipped and cautious confines the world is teaming with experiment, innovation and collective endeavour to build a good society.

38 degrees now has 2 million members and rising, Kickstarter has raised £22.5m for investment, open source software abounds and mass online education courses are just straws in the wind of a revolution that won’t be televised but tweeted.

Spurred on by new technology and a culture that celebrates self-organisation and a yearning for the emotional and not merely the material, these organisations, and thousand of others, carry the seeds of transformation precisely because the mode of production is by necessity egalitarian and democratic. On social media, online and in communities everyone now finds their voice. What these organisations know is that all of us together are smarter than any one of us and that experimentation is the quickest route to success. People are being the change they wish to see in the world.

This is not just about the left or politics; this is about every organisation that wants to succeed. In the private, public and civil sectors the new rules are adaption, experimentation, pluralism and respect.

And yet, as much the old political parties write themselves off, we know someone has to repeal the damned bedroom tax, someone has to cohere an ideology, decide a programme and stand candidates. In short, we need progressive political parties but they must be transformed if they are to be fit for these new times. They must open themselves up, showing they trust their members and communities. The art of political leadership in the 21st century is to help grow the capacity of people to collectively make change happen, not impose change on them.

Such transformative political change is inherently political. Too many of the horizontal movements, new and old, eschew politics – believing they can change the world without that tainted tribe. It’s a fool’s dream. Someone has to draw the threads together, to develop and deliver a narrative that speaks not to any section but to a nation. We have not gone beyond the need for parties; it’s just that their old command and control form is past its sell-by date.

Political change requires structure just as it requires innovation and participation. The most important word in the lexicon of new times is “and”. So its horizontal and vertical, red and green, freedom and security, equality and diversity. In this world of rich complexity only a deep and radical democratisation of the state, the economy and civil life will let us deal with the paradoxes and intricacies of a world of “and”, to enable the sustained transformation of the people, by the people, for the people.

So these new times demand leaders without egos and movements without silos on a journey in which our behaviour is key. Through our behaviour we both prefigure a good society and build support for it; because how we treat people is what they become. So the practice must be one of tolerance, empathy, compassion and, yes, love.

The alignment of these times and the values of self-governance make everything possible once more. The technology and the culture exist for the transformation of our world. Google and Facebook will vigorously contest the terrain to profit from it – but if we recognise the need for a politics of transformation that embraces both the vertical and the horizontal then the fight for a good society is back on.

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