Oh man, I was just making an argument for performance goals based off exactly this concept, but I hadn't thought of the framing of "soft orders of magnitude" --

Oh man, I was just making an argument for performance goals based off exactly this concept, but I hadn't thought of the framing of "soft orders of magnitude" -- that's a great analogy. Thinking a bit more, I think "paradigm shift" and "discontinuity" also works. Every "soft order of magnitude" is in fact a qualitative shift of the experience -- - "I can reasonably stare at this tool's output and wait for it to finish" - "I'll get distracted and look outside but I won't switch off task." - "Time for a coffee."