Are any rationality techniques one could leverage to generate ideas or solutions towards solving a specific problem?
This is probably the biggest obstacle for me to have effective goal factoring. I sometimes cannot come up with good ideas or alternatives.
I found this post, however it's 9 years old and wanted to see if there are any more recent techniques.
This is a pointer to a large categorization of techniques used for physical innovation. Elsewhere on the internet it has been adapted for software innovation. Try picking techniques randomly to see if you can creatively interpret them to provide a novel solution to your problem, repeat until inspired.
Ah, I've heard of this method before but never tried it.
Wondering if you had any recommended resources for using this for software innovation?
Disclaimer: I've never tried any of these things on real problems, they just seem like obvious answers.
The oldschool answer is to use Tarot or the Oblique Strategies, creatively interpret what you draw in the context of your problem, and evaluate whether that's an improvement over what you're currently doing. Personally, I'm more fond of the modern counterpart, Weird Sun Twitter's "Have you tried X?" meme, as incarnated here, here and here.
The Babble and Prune sequence might also be relevant here.