WASHINGTON — Every six weeks or so, around a giant mahogany table in an ornate room overlooking the National Mall, 16 people, one after another, give their take on how the U.S. economy is doing and what they, the leaders of the Federal Reserve, want to do about it.

Then there's a coffee break. While most of the policymakers make small talk in the hallway, their chairman, Ben Bernanke, pops into his office next-door and types out a few lines on his computer.

When the Federal Open Market Committee reconvenes, Bernanke speaks from the notes he printed moments earlier. "Here's what I think I heard," he'll say, before running through the range of views. He sometimes articulates the views of dissenters more persuasively than they did.

"Did I get it right?" he says.

The answer, in recent months, has been a resounding yes. And Bernanke's ability to understand and synthesize the views of his colleagues goes a long way toward explaining how he has revolutionized the Federal Reserve, which under his leadership has deployed trillions of dollars to try to contain the worst economic downturn in 80 years.

Famously soft-spoken, Bernanke is an unlikely revolutionary. He is, after all, a career economics professor who lacks the charisma of a skilled politician. He also happens to run an organization designed for inertia: Decision-making authority is shared with four other governors in Washington appointed by the president; the heads of regional Fed banks in 12 cities who answer to their own boards of directors; and a staff of 2,000 that is led by economists who spent decades working their way through a rigid hierarchy.

Yet in the past 18 months, Bernanke has transformed that stodgy organization, invoking rarely used emergency authorities. His decision to do so has drawn criticism — he has transcended traditional limits on the role of a central bank, stretched the Fed's legal authority and to some, usurped the responsibility of political authorities in committing vast sums of taxpayer dollars.

The Fed's actions put the economy on a "perilous" course, said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.

"The real risk is that he will wind up instigating rampant inflation" once the recession has passed, he said. "A related possibility is that the Fed has created incentives to overdo it in borrowing and lending ... which is what got us into this mess in the first place."

What strikes many who have worked with Bernanke, though, is that he has pulled it all off without grand speeches, arm-twisting or Machiavellian games. Rather, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Fed officials and others familiar with the workings of the central bank, he has enacted bold policy moves through measured, intellectual debates and by making even those who are resistant to some of the new actions feel that their concerns are understood.

To many Fed veterans, his leadership style is a stark contrast with that of his predecessor, Alan Green-span, whose tenure was characterized by tightly controlled decision-making with only rare open disagreement.

"It's not Ben's personality to pound the table and scream and say you're going to agree with me or else," said Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman and longtime colleague of Bernanke's at Princeton University. "It's not his way. I've known him for 25 years. He succeeds at persuading people by respecting their points of view and through the force of his own intellect. He doesn't say you're a jerk for disagreeing."

In other words, Bernanke has remade the Federal Reserve not in spite of his low-key style and proclivity for consensus-building. He has been able to remake the Fed because of it.

More than a few times over the past year, senior Fed staff members have logged into their e-mail accounts to find an unusual message. Subject: Blue Sky. Sender: Ben S. Bernanke.

The point of the e-mails has been to encourage them to think of creative ways that the Fed can guard the economy from the downdraft of a financial collapse.

This is an institution that not long ago could spend the better part of a two-day policymaking meeting deciding whether its target for short-term interest rates should be 5.25 percent or 5 percent. But in this crisis, rate cuts, the most common tool for helping the economy, have lacked their usual punch. The Fed already has dropped the rate it controls essentially to zero, meaning there is no room left to cut.

That's why Bernanke's Fed has been trying to dream up ideas out of the clear blue sky.

The result has been 15 Fed lending programs, many with four-letter acronyms, most of them unthinkable before the current crisis.

Many of the programs have required legal and financial gymnastics to enact, with the central bank being forced to invoke an emergency authority that allows it to lend to most any institution in "unusual and exigent circumstances." In the end, though, they have allowed the Fed to effectively create money to keep lending going.